11.64, Calls: Endangered Languages, Machine Learning
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LINGUIST List: Vol-11-64. Sun Jan 16 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875.
Subject: 11.64, Calls: Endangered Languages, Machine Learning
Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>
Andrew Carnie: U. of Arizona <carnie at linguistlist.org>
Reviews: Andrew Carnie: U. of Arizona <carnie at linguistlist.org>
Associate Editors: Martin Jacobsen <marty at linguistlist.org>
Ljuba Veselinova <ljuba at linguistlist.org>
Scott Fults <scott at linguistlist.org>
Jody Huellmantel <jody at linguistlist.org>
Karen Milligan <karen at linguistlist.org>
Assistant Editors: Lydia Grebenyova <lydia at linguistlist.org>
Naomi Ogasawara <naomi at linguistlist.org>
James Yuells <james at linguistlist.org>
Software development: John H. Remmers <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
Sudheendra Adiga <sudhi at linguistlist.org>
Qian Liao <qian at linguistlist.org>
Home Page: http://linguistlist.org/
Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karen at linguistlist.org>
==========================================================================
As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations
or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in
the text.
=================================Directory=================================
1)
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 22:59:47 +0000
From: Nicholas Ostler <nostler at chibcha.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Endangered Languages and Literacy
2)
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 14:54:25 -0800 (PST)
From: Seth Rogers <rogers at rtna.daimlerchrysler.com>
Subject: International Conference on Machine Learning/ Final CFP
-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 22:59:47 +0000
From: Nicholas Ostler <nostler at chibcha.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Endangered Languages and Literacy
Fourth International Conference
hosted by the
Foundation for Endangered Langauges
"Endangered Languages and Literacy"
----------------------------------------
Charlotte, North Carolina, USA - 21-24 September 2000
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
When a language is endangered, it is because the community who
use it may cease to do so the foreseeable future. This is often
because new generations of the community are not acquiring the
language, or if they do, are not using it so much as speakers in
the past.
Literacy, the ability to read and write a written form of the
language, has often been viewed a necessary first step in
maintaining and promoting use of the language. The introduction
of literacy is predicated upon the development of an acceptable
written form of a language, a step considered by many essential
for:
- the creation of grammars, dictionaries, and teaching materials;
- the preservation of traditional oral literature in communities
where the younger generations lack the patience to learn the
texts orally.
However, efforts to develop a written language and instill
literacy may encounter cultural obstacles and have unforeseen
consequences. For example:
- the development of literacy may, over time, fundamentally alter
or interrupt the oral transmission of a community's knowledge
and beliefs;
- the members of the community may resist efforts to introduce
literacy due to cultural beliefs about, for example, the
spiritual or mystical nature of oral communication;
- the introduction of literacy may create divisions within the
community between the literate and the illiterate that
ultimately may have social or economic implications.
Even within communities that are receptive to the introduction of
literacy, the development of an acceptable written language may
pose challenges:
- there may be difficulties selecting one of several dialects
upon which to base the written language;
- there may be problems adapting existing alphabets, syllabaries
or other writing systems to the sound system of the language;
- the availability of typewriter or computer fonts may force
unacceptable compromises in the orthography for the language;
- the language may lack acceptable vocabulary or syntactic
structures to replace in the written language suprasegmental,
kinetic, and paralinguistic components of oral, face-to-face
communication.
Modern technologies, however, have brought additional choices to
endangered language communities. For example, with tape
recorders, compact disk recorders, video recorders, television,
radio, and computers, it possible to create "talking"
dictionaries, grammars and books, thereby eliminating the need
for a written language and literacy. But these technologies are
not without their own limitations:
- the costs of acquiring and maintaining desired technologies may
be prohibitive;
- the community may lack members with the expertise to employ the
desired technologies, or the resources to train members in the
technologies or hire outsiders;
- the community may not be willing to accept/use the chosen
technologies.
All these issues, and more, are relevant to our conference this
year.
The workshop will provide a forum for researchers and activists
working for the maintenance of indigenous languages that face an
uncertain future. (It is the fourth in a series of annual
workshops and conferences hosted by the Foundation for Endangered
Languages.)
The Foundation for Endangered Languages is a registered charity
in England and Wales. FEL conferences, besides being
opportunities to discuss the issues from a global viewpoint, are
working meetings of the Foundation, defining our overall policy
for future years. Participants at the conference therefore need
to be members of the Foundation. There are full facilities to
join on arrival, but all proposers are strongly urged to join as
soon as possible, and so take full part in the Foundation's
activities in the lead-up to the conference.
The dates will be 21-24 September 2000. In keeping with the
theme of this year's meeting, the workshop will take place near
the homeland of Sequoyah, the father of Cherokee literacy, at
University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the United States.
There will be a preliminary volume of proceedings distributed at
the Conference.
Presentations will last twenty minutes each, with a further ten
minutes for discussion. All presentations should be accessible
largely in English, but use of the languages of interest, for
quotation or exemplification, may well be appropriate.
Organizers:
Blair Rudes (chair) University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Nicholas Ostler Foundation for Endangered Languages, Bath,
England
Christopher Moseley BBC Monitoring Service
Karen Johnson-Weiner St. Lawrence University, Canton, New
York, USA
Hassan Ouzzate Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco
Programme Committee:
Margaret Allen, McKenna Brown, Karen Johnson-Weiner, Tony McEnery,
Eugene McKendry, Christopher Moseley, David Nash, Nicholas
Ostler, Hassan Ouzzate, Jon Reyhner, Mari Rhydwen, Blair Rudes,
Jane Simpson, Tasaku Tsunoda, Anthony Woodbury, Akira Yamamoto
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
Abstracts should not exceed 500 words. They can be submitted in
one of two ways: hard copy or electronic submission. They
should be in English.
A) Hard copies (or faxes):
One copy should be sent to:
Blair A. Rudes
Department of English
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
9201 University City Boulevard
Charlotte, North Carolina 28223-0001
USA
FAX: 1-704-547-3961
TEL: 1-704-547-4230
This should have a clear short title, but should not bear
anything to identify the author(s).
On a separate sheet, please include the following information:
NAME : Names of the author(s)
TITLE: Title of the paper
EMAIL: Email address of the first author, if any
ADDR: Postal address of the first author
TEL: Telephone number of the first author, if any
FAX: Fax number of the first author, if any
The name of the first author will be used in all correspondence.
If possible, please also send an e-mail to Blair Rudes at
<BARudes at email.uncc.edu> informing him of the hard copy
submission. This is in case the hard copy does not reach its
destination. This e-mail should contain the information
specified in the section below.
B) Electronic submission:
Electronic submission should be in plain ascii text email message
giving the following details:
# NAME : Name of first author
# TITLE: Title of the paper
# EMAIL: E-mail address of the first author
# ADDR: Postal address of the first author
# TEL: Telephone number of the first author, if any
# FAX: Fax number of the first author
and in a separate section
# ABSTR: Abstract of the paper
IMPORTANT DATES
Abstract submission deadline March 21
Notification of Committee's decision April 21
Authors submit camera-ready text July 21
Conference Sept 21-24
- --------------------------------------------------------------
Nicholas Ostler
Linguacubun Ltd
"technology for the languages of the world"
Batheaston Villa, 172 Bailbrook Lane
Bath BA1 7AA England
+44-1225-85-2865 fax +44-1225-85-9258
nostler at chibcha.demon.co.uk
-------------------------------- Message 2 -------------------------------
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 14:54:25 -0800 (PST)
From: Seth Rogers <rogers at rtna.daimlerchrysler.com>
Subject: International Conference on Machine Learning/ Final CFP
A final reminder- only 12 days until the submission deadline.
Call for Papers
THE SEVENTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MACHINE LEARNING
June 29-July 2, 2000
Stanford University
The Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-2000)
will be held at Stanford University from June 29 to July 2, 2000, in the
heart of Silicon Valley. The conference will bring together researchers
to exchange ideas and report recent progress in the computational study
of learning.
Topics for Submission
ICML-2000 welcomes submissions on all facets of machine learning, but
especially solicits papers on problem areas, research topics, learning
paradigms, and approaches to evaluation that have been rare at recent
conferences, including:
- the role of learning in natural language, vision and speech, planning
and scheduling, design and configuration, logical and spatial reasoning,
motor control, and more generally on learning for performance tasks
carried out by intelligent agents;
- the discovery of scientific laws and taxonomies, the construction of
componential and structural models, and learning at multiple levels
of temporal and spatial resolution;
- the effect of the developers' decisions about problem formulation,
representation, data quality, and reward function on the learning
process;
- computational models of human learning, applications to real-world
problems, exploratory research that describes novel learning tasks,
work that integrates familiar methods to demonstrate new functionality,
and agent architectures in which learning plays a central role;
- empirical studies that combine natural data (to show relevance) with
synthetic data (to understand conditions on behavior), along with formal
analyses that make contact with empirical results, especially where the
aim is to identify sources of power, rather than to show one method is
superior to others.
Naturally, we also welcome submissions on traditional topics, ranging
from induction over supervised data to learning from delayed rewards, but
we hope the conference will also attract contributions on the issues above.
Review Process
The ICML-2000 review process will be structured to encourage publications
covering a broad range of research and to foster increased participation
in the conference. To this end, we have instituted:
- area chairs who will be responsible for recruiting papers in their area
of expertise and overseeing the review process for those submissions;
- conditional acceptance of papers that are not publishable in their initial
form, but that can be improved enough for inclusion in time to appear in
the proceedings; and
- a review form that requires referees to explicitly list any problems
with a paper, what it would take to overcome them, and, if they recommend
rejection, why it cannot be fixed in time for inclusion.
The overall goal is to make the review process more like that in journals,
with time for the authors to incorporate feedback from reviewers. Each
submitted paper will be reviewed by two members of the program committee,
with the decision about its acceptance overseen by the responsible area
chair and the program chair.
Paper Submission
Authors should submit papers using same format and length as the final
proceedings version. The detailed instructions for authors at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/icml2k/instructions.html
include pointers to templates for LaTeX and Word documents. These specify
two-column style, Times Roman font with 10 point type, vertical spacing
of 11 points, overall text width of 6.75 inches, length of 9.0 inches,
0.25 inches between the two columns, top margin of 1.0 inch, and left
margin of 0.75 inch. (The right and bottom margins will depend on whether
one uses US letter or A4 paper.) Papers must not exceed eight (8) pages
including figures and references. We will return to the authors any
papers that do not satisfy these requirements.
The deadline for submissions to ICML-2000 is MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2000.
Submission will be entirely electronic by transferring papers to the
ICML-2000 ftp site, as explained in the detailed instructions for
authors. Authors must submit papers in POSTSCRIPT format to ensure
our ability to print them out for review.
Each submission must be accompanied by the paper's title, the authors'
names and physical addresses, a 250-word abstract, the contact author's
email address and phone number, and the author who would present the
talk at the conference. Authors must enter this information into the
submission form at the conference web site by FRIDAY, JANUARY 21.
ICML-2000 allows simultaneous submission to other conferences, provided
this fact is clearly indicated on the submission form. Accepted papers
will appear in the conference proceedings only if they are withdrawn
from other conferences. Simultaneous submissions that are not clearly
specified as such will be rejected.
Other Conference Information
The Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning will be
collocated with the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Computational
Learning Theory (COLT-2000) and the Sixteenth Conference on Uncertainty
in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-2000). Registrants to any of these
meetings will be able to attend the technical sessions of the others
at no additional cost.
ICML-2000 will also be preceded by tutorials on various facets of
machine learning. For additional information, see the web site for
the conference at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/icml2k/
which will provide additional details as they become available. If
you have questions about ICML-2000, please send electronic mail to
icml2k at csli.stanford.edu.
The conference has received support from DaimlerChrysler Research and
Technology, Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information
(CSLI), and the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise (ISLE).
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