Introduction

摘要

The interest in language resources and computational models for the study of similar languages, varieties and dialects has been growing substantially in the last few years. The first edition of the Workshop on Applying NLP tools to similar languages, varieties and dialects (VarDial) confirms the interest in the topic. Within the NLP community, the impact of language variation in the development of language resources and NLP applications has been explored in recent years with experiments in different directions. For example, automatic classification or identification of closely related languages such as in Huang and Lee (2008) and Tiedemann and Ljubesic (2012); corpus-driven studies focusing on lexical variation between varieties such as the one by Piersman et al. (2010) or Ljubesic and Fiser (2013); and finally, the adaptation of language models in the context of machine translation such as in Nakov and Tiedemann (2012).