SIGTURK October 2023 Newsletter
Duygu Ataman
Dear SIGTURK members,
Please find recent updates from our community and interesting opportunities below.
Research activities
SIGTURK has started an in-depth and open collaboration research study of foundation models and how they can be used for data collection and benchmarking in Turkic languages through a generous recent support by Microsoft. We are in hopes to create an inclusive benchmark as an outcome of this study with representation of as many Turkic languages as possible. If members are conducting or experienced in foundation models, conduct language-specific linguistic studies in their own language or dialect, or a speaker of an under-represented Turkic language and would like to be involved in this project they are welcome to reach out to us or drop by at our weekly meetings.
Upcoming events
ACL has confirmed the organization of the 1st SIGTURK Workshop in 2024, in collocation with ACL in Bangkok, Thailand. We are planning this event to be a 2-day workshop, one day dedicated to research from our community and one day to a hybrid hackathon for putting together an initial infrastructure of computational resources for natural language processing in Turkic languages. We are looking for academic members of our community with different levels of seniority to serve in the organization, program and publication committees. If you'd like to contribute to the organization please get in touch with Duygu Ataman or Sardana Ivanova.Opportunities
Cohere for AI Lab is looking for contributors that speak Turkic languages for their open-science project Aya to accelerate progress in multilingual AI. The main objective of this project is to build an instruction style dataset consisting of prompts & completions in multiple languages. Contributors obtain the chance of different levels of prizes or recognition in the AYA Dataset paper. If you are interested please join their Discord server to get in touch.
If you have any opportunities, events or research activities (theses, publications or open collaborations) related to the computational linguistics of Turkic languages you would like to be featured on the newsletter please feel free to send an e-mail to our mailing list.
Thank you for your interest and have a wonderful month.
SIGTURK