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CALL FOR PAPERS:<br>
<br>
Computational approaches to the study of dialectal and typological
variation<br>
<br>
Workshop organized as part of the European Summer School on Logic,
Language and Information ESSLLI 2012 (<a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.esslli2012.pl">http://www.esslli2012.pl</a>),
August 6-10 2012 (ESSLLI first week), Opole, Poland<br>
<br>
Workshop Organizers: Erhard Hinrichs (<a
class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:erhard.hinrichs@uni-tuebingen.de">erhard.hinrichs@uni-tuebingen.de</a>),
Gerhard Jäger (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:gerhard.jaeger@uni-tuebingen.de">gerhard.jaeger@uni-tuebingen.de</a>)<br>
<br>
Workshop Purpose:<br>
<br>
Computational dialectometry is an innovative method to investigate
language variation. This still rather young approach employs
techniques from statistical NLP - such as pattern recognition,
sequence alignment, clustering, and dimension reduction techniques -
to study synchronous dialectal variation. It uses
easy-to-operationalize data (such as phonetic transcriptions of a
small core vocabulary) collected from a large number of speakers
within a certain geographic area. Methods from unsupervised machine
learning are then used to measure dialect distances and to model
dialect continua. Together with advances in digitally collecting
population and geographic data, it is now possible to study the
correlation of linguistic variation with social and geographic
factors.<br>
<br>
Recent years have seen remarkable efforts in typology to set up
electronic data inventories that contain significant data sets from
large, typologically diverse and representative samples of
languages. The data types thus collected in computational typology
are remarkably similar - from an operational point of view - to the
kind of resources that are being used in computational
dialectometry. It is therefore a natural move to bring these two
communities into contact and to discuss the mutual usability of
algorithms and perhaps common standards for data encoding and
exchange.<br>
<br>
The goals of this workshop are twofold:<br>
- to expose the ESSLLI community in general and researchers at the
interface of language and computation in particular to the
application of data-driven NLP methods to a rather new domain, and<br>
- to provide a forum for practitioners and students of computational
dialectometry, of quantitative typology, and of historical
linguistics to learn about each other's research concerns and
accompanying methods, and to receive feedback as well as inspiration
for possible collaboration across sub-disciplines.<br>
<br>
Submission Details<br>
<br>
Authors are invited to submit an EXTENDED ABSTRACT for a 30-minute
presentation (including discussion). Submissions should not exceed 3
pages, including figures, data, and references. Details about the
anonymous electronic submission procedure will be posted with the
second Call for Papers. The submissions will be reviewed anonymously
by the workshop's programme committee. The abstracts accepted for
presentation will appear in the workshop web site and be published
as part of the ESSLLI 2012 proceedings. In addition, we are
considering the possibility of compiling a journal special issue
from selected papers presented at the workshop.<br>
<br>
Program Committee: TBA<br>
<br>
Local Arrangements:<br>
<br>
All workshop participants, including the authors, are required to
register for ESSLLI.<br>
<br>
Important Dates:<br>
<br>
- December 20: Second Call for Papers<br>
- January 15: Final Call for Papers<br>
- February 15: <b class="moz-txt-star"><span class="moz-txt-tag">*</span>Deadline<span
class="moz-txt-tag">*</span></b> for Submission<br>
- April 15: Notification of Acceptance<br>
- June 1: Deadline for Proceedings Papers<br>
- August 6-10: Workshop<br>
<br>
<br>
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