Preface
The International conference “Linguistic Forum 2020: Language and Artificial Intelligence” took
place in 2020 on November 12-14 in Moscow, Russia. The conference is organized by the Institute
of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences. This conference is part of a series of annual forums
initiated by the Institute of Linguistics RAS in 2019.
The aim of the 2020 forum is to foster dialogue among researchers working at the interface of
linguistics and artificial intelligence including those engaged in computational linguistics and
natural language processing. Developments in AI have been responsible for recent advances in
natural language generation and comprehension; they have also expanded the boundaries of these
technologies’ applicability. Neural networks and dense embeddings have replaced models based
on feature engineering and traditional discrete categories of linguistic analysis. As a result, the
boundary between fundamental and applied linguistic research is being eroded. Empirical
linguistics is taking on board these new technologies, in part, to enable better modelling of
language and documentation of data. AI is also increasingly becoming a part of the everyday life
of language users. Can fundamental linguistics currently offer technologically viable ideas or
methods? These and similar conceptual and methodological problems were the focus of the forum.
Among the topics that would be of interest to discuss at the forum, the Program Committee
highlights the following:

   •   Neural networks (and other machine learning methods) and the problems of their
       interpretability
   •   Language generation and comprehension: commonalities and differences
   •   Linguistic diversity and multilingualism as challenges for AI
   •   Discourse types: modes, genres, and styles
   •   Textual complexity and coherence
   •   Language in the context of multimodal communication
   •   Modelling individual differences in language
   •   Non-discrete phenomena in language
   •   Emerging and prospective linguistic technologies.

There were 101 submissions, 73 reports were accepted. All the papers reviewed by independent
experts and members of the program committee. There are 4 plenary reports at the conference.
More than 90 participants from China, Italy, Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, Canada, Belarus,
many cities of Russia took part in the conference. The conference was held online. Abstracts of
reports, presentations and video performances are posted on the conference website https://iling-
ran.ru/web/en/conferences/2020_lingforum. For publication in the proceedings of the
conference, 10 papers and 2 short papers reported in sections and 3 annotations of plenary
reports were selected.



                                                                                  Valery Solovyev
                                                                            Natalia Loukachevitch
                                                                              Olga Lyashevskaya
Program Committee

   •   Andrej A. Kibrik (chairman) (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences,
       Lomonosov Moscow State University)
   •   Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (University of Gothenburg (Göteborgs universitet))
   •   Pavel Braslavski (Ural Federal University, National Research University Higher School
       of Economics)
   •   Elena Filatova (CUNY)
   •   Eduard Klyshinskiy (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
   •   Artemy Kotov (National Research Center «Kurchatov Institute», Russian State University
       for the Humanities)
   •   Andrey Kutuzov (University of Oslo (Universitetet i Oslo))
   •   Sergei Kuznetsov (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
   •   Varvara Logacheva (Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology)
   •   Natalia Loukachevitch (Lomonosov Moscow State University)
   •   Olga Lyashevskaya (National Research University Higher School of Economics, V.V.
       Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences)
   •   Dmitry Muromtsev (ITMO University)
   •   Boris Orekhov (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
   •   † Gennady Osipov (Federal Research Center "Computer Science and Control” of the
       Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence)
   •   Nadezhda Riabtseva (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences)
   •   Vladimir Salimovsky (Perm State University)
   •   Vladimir Selegey (ABBYY, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology)
   •   Sergei Sharov (University of Leeds)
   •   Ivan Smirnov (Institute of Artificial Intelligence Research, FRC CSC of the Russian
       Academy of Sciences)
   •   Valery Solovyev (Kazan Federal University)
   •   David Talbot (Yandex)

Organizing Committee

   •   Andrey Shluinsky (chairman)
   •   Natalia Artamonova
   •   Vadim Dyachkov
   •   Valentin Gusev
   •   Dmitry Kolomatskiy
   •   Olga Orlova
   •   Ekaterina Oschepkova
   •   Konstantin Polivanov
   •   Tamara Storozhenko
   •   Dmitry Zalmanov