History
The Ukrainian NLP community has only started forming in recent years, with most of the projects done by isolated groups of researchers. The UNLP workshop, which started as the joint initiative of the Ukrainian Catholic University and National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, aims to build bridges between different research groups working on Ukrainian NLP. It became a platform for discussion, sharing of ideas, and collaboration.
UNLP 2021
The first UNLP took place in 2021 in Kherson, Ukraine, and was held in a hybrid format. The workshop was co-located with ICTERI 2021 and had John McCrae from Data Science Institute in Ireland as the keynote speaker. You can find more information on the web page of UNLP 2021. The proceedings were accepted to a Springer publication and can also be found on the ICTERI 2021 website.
UNLP 2023
The second UNLP was co-located with EACL 2023 and was held mostly online. EACL 2023 should have taken place in Kyiv, Ukraine, but due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, these plans had to be canceled. Despite the war, the UNLP workshop at EACL raised a lot of interest and hosted around 100 attendees. Two invited speakers, Mona Diab and Gulnara Muratova, delivered their keynotes on the topics of low-resource and severely endangered languages. The workshop featured the first shared task in Ukrainian GEC, which attracted 15 teams, of which six teams submitted their solutions before the deadline. The proceedings were published in the ACL Anthology. You can find more information about UNLP 2023 at https://2023.unlp.org.ua/.
UNLP 2024
The third UNLP was co-located with LREC-COLING 2024 and was held in a hybrid format. The workshop hosted about 120 attendees and had two keynote speakers. Ivan Vulić from the University of Cambridge presented his work on equitable and culturally adapted multilingual dialog systems, and Vasyl Starko and Andriy Rysin shared their experience in the creation of corpora and tools for Ukrainian. The workshop featured the first Shared Task on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Ukrainian. 16 papers were presented during the workshop, three of which were focused on shared task systems. The proceedings were linked to the ACL Anthology. You can find more information about UNLP 2024 at https://2024.unlp.org.ua/.