Proceedings of the EMNLP’2014 Workshop on Language Technology for Closely Related Languages and Language Variants

Recent initiatives in language technology have led to the development of at least minimal language processing toolkits for all EU-official languages as well as for languages with a large number of speakers worldwide such as Chinese and Arabic. This is a big step towards the automatic processing and/or extraction of information, especially from official documents and newspapers, where the standard, literary language is used.Apart from those official languages, a large number of dialects or closely-related language variants are in daily use, not only as spoken colloquial languages but also in some written media, eg, in SMS, chats, and social networks. Building language resources and tools for them from scratch is expensive, but the efforts can often be reduced by making use of pre-existing resources and tools for related, resource-richer languages.