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FINAL 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>
<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>
Additional information about the workshop is available at:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/%7Egjaeger/conferences/essli_2012/">http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~gjaeger/conferences/essli_2012/</a><br>
<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. <br>
<br>
Please upload your submission at EasyChair via the following link:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=diatyp12">https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=diatyp12</a><br>
<br>
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 will 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>
<br>
Program Committee <br>
<br>
Balthasar Bickel (Zürich University), Michael Cysouw (LMU München),
Charlotte Gooskens (Groningen University), Erhard Hinrichs (Tübingen
University; co-chair), Gerhard Jäger (Tübingen University;
co-chair), Brian Joseph (The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio),
John Nerbonne (Groningen University), Søren Wichmann (MPI for
Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig) <br>
<br>
<br>
Local Arrangements <br>
<br>
All workshop participants, including the authors, are required to
register for ESSLLI. <br>
<br>
<br>
Important Dates <br>
<br>
- March 1: <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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