With the ever increasing digitisation of all areas of life – communication, commerce, manufacturing, health, mobility, entertainment, society, living etc. – the field of Computational Linguistics and Language Technologies has reached an unprecedented level of importance and relevance. The digital age is creating multiple key challenges, many of which can be fully or partially addressed by Language Technologies. Among these crucial digital challenges are:

• the increasing economic, social and political relevance of online news and online media (see, for example, the fake news and filter bubble debates),

• multilingual technologies for multilingual societies (for example, to bridge language barriers, to improve communication with refugees, to foster economic growth),

• broad coverage and high-quality text analytics for big data oder digital humanities applications,

• robust spoken language interfaces for connected devices, both at home and also in manufacturing contexts (Internet of Things, Industrial IoT).

An orthogonal challenge has recently been emerging in the form of several breakthroughs in applied Artificial Intelligence research, especially Deep Learning. In that regard, key questions revolve, among others, around the integration of Deep Learning approaches and architectures into traditional symbolic Natural Language Processing pipelines (and vice versa).

For GSCL 2017 we invite contributions to any topic related to Computational Linguistics and Language Technology. We especially encourage submissions that are related to the main theme, i.e., models, methods, approaches or technologies that address one or more of the key challenges of the digital age, only some of which are briefly mentioned above. Submissions do not necessarily need to have an applied or technology component, theoretical papers presenting the results of basic research related to the main conference theme (or other topics) are also welcome. Submissions that concentrate on the German language are encouraged in particular.