15.353, Calls: General Ling; Computational Ling/Switzerland

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-15-353. Thu Jan 29 2004. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 15.353, Calls: General Ling; Computational Ling/Switzerland

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry, Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org):
	Sheila Collberg, U. of Arizona
	Terence Langendoen, U. of Arizona

Home Page:  http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Andrea Berez <andrea 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.

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html.

=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Thu, 29 Jan 2004 18:51:35 -0500 (EST)
From:  Kim Potowski kimpotow at uic.edu
Subject:  20th Spanish in the US & 5th Spanish in Contact with Other Languages

2)
Date:  Thu, 29 Jan 2004 17:36:34 -0500 (EST)
From:  karinem at alumni.usc.edu
Subject:  Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Thu, 29 Jan 2004 18:51:35 -0500 (EST)
From:  Kim Potowski kimpotow at uic.edu
Subject:  20th Spanish in the US & 5th Spanish in Contact with Other Languages

20th Spanish in the US & 5th Spanish in Contact with Other Languages

Date: 14-Apr-2005 - 16-Apr-2005
Location: Chicago, IL, United States of America
Contact: Kim Potowski
Contact Email: kimpotow at uic.edu
Meeting URL: http://spaninus.uic.edu

Linguistic Sub-field: General Linguistics
Subject Language: Spanish
Call Deadline: 30-Sep-2004


Meeting Description:

Submissions are invited for 20-minute presentations in any area
related to Spanish in the United States or Spanish in contact with
other languages, including language maintenance and shift, language
variation, language policy and planning, discourse analysis, language
attitudes, language acquisition, development, and attrition, heritage
language education, language in public life, and other relevant
topics.  Presentations may be given in Spanish or English. Papers
about Spanish use in less commonly studied areas of the United States
are especially encouraged.

Please send the following to fstayn1 at uic.edu via Rich Text Format
(RTF) attachment:

1) One page containing the following information: The meeting for
which the paper is intended (Spanish in the U.S. or Spanish in
Contact), audiovisual requests, title, and the name, academic
affiliation, current address, phone and fax numbers, and e-mail
address of each author.

2) On a separate page: an anonymous one-page abstract with
title. There may be one additional page for references. Abstracts
should be 1.5 or double spaced, in 12-point type. Authors may submit a
total of two abstracts, one individual and one joint.

Please note: All submissions must be via email attachments in Rich
Text Format (RTF) by September 30th, 2004. Regular mail should be used
only as a last resort and must be postmarked by September 30, 2004:

Spanish in the US/In contact
The University of Illinois at Chicago
Department of Spanish, French, Italian & Portuguese
1727 UH, MC-315
601 S. Morgan St.
Chicago, IL 60607


-------------------------------- Message 2 -------------------------------

Date:  Thu, 29 Jan 2004 17:36:34 -0500 (EST)
From:  karinem at alumni.usc.edu
Subject:  Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages

Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages
Short Title: COLING2004 workshop

Date: 28-Aug-2004 - 28-Aug-2004
Location: Geneva, Switzerland
Contact: Karine Megerdoomian
Contact Email: karinem at inxight.com
Meeting URL: http://members.cox.net/karinem/COLING2004

Linguistic Sub-field: Computational Linguistics
Subject Language: Arabic, Standard ,Kurdi ,Pashto, Southern ,Farsi,
Western ,Urdu

Call Deadline: 25-Mar-2004


Meeting Description:

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the study of the
languages of the Middle East, especially Arabic, Persian (Farsi),
Pashto and Urdu. Computational applications for proper name
identification, entity recognition, categorization, information
retrieval, summarization, machine translation and other
implementations are currently in high demand. The goal of this
workshop, being held as a session of COING 2004, is to provide a forum
for those involved in the development of NLP systems in Arabic script
languages to exchange ideas, approaches and implementations of
computational systems; to discuss the common challenges faced by all
practitioners; and to assess the state of the art in the field. The
workshop is a session of COLING 2004 (20th International Conference on
Computational Linguistics) which will take place at the University of
Geneva, Switzerland, on August 23-27, 2004.

COLING CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the study of the
languages of the Middle East, especially Arabic, Persian (Farsi),
Pashto and Urdu. This sudden and urgent interest is manifested by the
availability of funding for rapid development of practical systems for
processing large volumes of data in these languages. Computational
applications for proper name identification, entity recognition,
categorization, information retrieval, summarization, machine
translation and other implementations are currently in high
demand. This comes at a time when advances in formal and computational
linguistics over the last fifty years are being consolidated, while
work on machine learning and statistical methods has been showing
great promise.

Although there exists a considerable body of work in computational
linguistics specifically targeted to these middle eastern languages,
much of the research and development has been the result of
initiatives by individual research establishments or industry
firms. Furthermore, the usage of the Arabic script gives rise to
certain issues that are common to all these languages despite their
being of distinct language families. Hence, these languages share
properties such as the absence of capitalization, right to left
direction, lack of clear word boundaries, complex word structure, a
high degree of ambiguity due to non-representation of short vowels in
the writing system, and related encoding issues.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for those involved in
the development of NLP systems in Arabic script languages to exchange
ideas, approaches and implementations of computational systems; to
discuss the common challenges faced by all practitioners; and to
assess the state of the art in the field. In addition, one of the aims
of the workshop is to identify promising areas for future
collaborative research in the development of NLP systems for Arabic
script languages. Solutions that are designed to solve the specific
problems of these languages could very well have wider applications
and relevance to the rest of the NLP community.

WORKSHOP TOPICS

Authors of papers in any area of NLP in Arabic script-based languages
are encouraged to apply. We encourage submissions dealing with
language-specific issues, as well as discussions of challenges imposed
by the usage of the Arabic script. Papers could be on - but not
limited to - any of the following topics:

* Morphological analysis
* Syntactic ambiguity resolution
* Relevance of shallow parsing
* Machine translation from and to Arabic script languages
* Sense disambiguation
* Homograph resolution
* Semantic analysis
* Entity recognition
* Information retrieval
* Classification of documents
* Text mining
* Summarization
* Statistical approaches
* Speech recognition and generation
* Lexical databases
* Knowledge and domain representation
* Spelling and grammar checking tools

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Papers should be original, previously unpublished work and should not
identify the author(s). They should emphasize completed work rather
than intended work. Papers that are being submitted to other
conferences must reflect this fact on the title page.

Submissions should be no longer than 8 pages (including figures and
references). Email submissions (ps or pdf) are preferred and should be
sent to both AliFarghaly at aol.com and karinem at inxight.com by midnight
of the due date. Submissions should be in English. The papers should
be attached to an email indicating contact information for the
author(s) and paper's title. Formatting requirements for the final
version of accepted papers will be posted as soon as they become
available.

Hardcopy submissions should be sent to:
 Ali Farghaly
 SYSTRAN Software, Inc.
 9333 Genesee Ave, Pl 1
 San Diego, CA 92121
 USA

IMPORTANT DATES

Submissions due: March 25th, 2004
Notification date: April 25th, 2004
Deadline for camera ready copy: May 25th, 2004

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

This workshop is organized by
Ali Farghaly (SYSTRAN Software, Inc.)
Karine Megerdoomian (Inxight Software and University of California San
Diego)

The call for papers as well as future information on the workshop can
be found at http://members.cox.net/karinem/COLING2004

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

 Jan W. Amtrup, Bowne Global Solutions
 Tim Buckwalter, Linguistic Data Consortium
 Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Carnegie Mellon University
 Joseph Dichy, Lyon University
 Andrew Freeman, University of Washington
 Nizar Habash, University of Maryland, College Park
 Masayo Iida, Inxight Software, Inc.
 Simin Karimi, University of Arizona
 Martin Kay, Stanford University
 Kevin Knight, USC/Information Sciences Institute
 Farhad Oroumchian, University of Wollongong in Dubai
 Ahmed Rafea, The American University in Cairo
 Jean Senellart, SYSTRAN Software
 Rémi Zajac, SYSTRAN Software

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-15-353