15.2711, Calls: Computational Ling/UK; Historical Ling/UK

Fri Oct 1 00:00:48 UTC 2004

LINGUIST List: Vol-15-2711. Thu Sep 30 2004. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 15.2711, Calls: Computational Ling/UK; Historical Ling/UK                                                                                                                                                               

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1)
Date: 27-Sep-2004
From: Aline Villavicencio < avill at essex.ac.uk >
Subject: 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions 

2)
Date: 28-Sep-2004
From: Nils Langer < nils.langer at bris.ac.uk >
Subject: Language History from Below 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:58:29
From: Aline Villavicencio < avill at essex.ac.uk >
Subject: 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions 

Full Title: 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of 
Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and 
Applications 

Short Title: Prep05 

Date: 19-Apr-2005 - 21-Apr-2005
Location: Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Aline Villavicencio
Meeting Email: prep05 at essex.ac.uk
Web Site: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~avill/Prep05.html 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 10-Jan-2005 

Meeting Description:

In the linguistic and computational linguistic communities, much of the effort
has been devoted to the understanding of the syntax and semantics of verbs and
nouns. On the other hand, prepositions, partly due to their very polysemic
nature and the difficulty of identifying (cross-)linguistic regularities, have
received much less attention.

Recently, however, there has been a growing awareness of the difficulties 
posed by prepositions and the importance of providing adequate means of
 capturing them, for many different applications. Several projects have now 
focused on the understanding of certain aspects of prepositions from 
perspectives such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing 
(NLP), psycholinguistics and ethnolinguistics. 

For instance, some research has concentrated on spatial or temporal aspects 
of prepositions, and their cross-linguistic differences. Several investigations
have also been carried out on quite diverse languages, emphasizing, for
example,
monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts or the role of prepositions in
syntactic alternations. These observations cover in general a small group of
closely related prepositions. The semantic characterization of prepositions has
also motivated the emergence of a few dedicated logical frameworks and
reasoning
procedures.

Languages like English have phrasal verbs, and these combinations of verbs 
and prepositions (in prepositional verbs or verb-particle constructions), have
also been the subject of considerable effort, going from techniques for their 
automatic extraction from corpora, to methods for the determination of their 
semantics.  Other languages, like Romance languages or Hindi, either 
incorporate the preposition or include it in the prepositional phrase. All
these 
configurations are semantically as well as syntactically of much interest. 

In NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have attracted a lot of attention, with 
different machine learning techniques having been employed with varying 
degrees of success. 

In this context, a successful workshop on prepositions was held in Toulouse, 
in September 2003, with papers presenting research in a wide variety of 
topics, examining prepositions in languages like French, English, German 
and Japanese, some from a more computational approach and others more 
linguistic. 

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on 
prepositions from a variety of backgrounds, such as linguistics, NLP, AI 
and psycholinguistics, providing a forum for discussing, among others, the
syntax, semantics, description, representation and computational 
applications of prepositions, with the ultimate aim to advance the 
state-of-the-art, identify challenges, and promote future collaborations 
among researchers interested in the different aspects of prepositions.

Second ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on The Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions 
and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications.

April 19th-21st, 2005, University of Essex, UK

Endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL's (Association for Computational Linguistics)
Special Interest Group in Computational Semantics.

In the linguistic and computational linguistic communities, much of the effort 
has been devoted to the understanding of the syntax and semantics of verbs 
and nouns. On the other hand, prepositions, partly due to their very polysemic
nature and the difficulty of identifying (cross-)linguistic regularities, have 
received much less attention.

Recently, however, there has been a growing awareness of the difficulties 
posed by prepositions and the importance of providing adequate means of 
capturing them, for many different applications. Several projects have now 
focused on the understanding of certain aspects of prepositions from 
perspectives such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing 
(NLP), psycholinguistics and ethnolinguistics. 

For instance, some research has concentrated on spatial or temporal aspects 
of prepositions, and their cross-linguistic differences. Several
investigations 
have also been carried out on quite diverse languages, emphasizing, for 
example, monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts or the role of 
prepositions in syntactic alternations. These observations cover in general a 
small group of closely related prepositions. The semantic characterization of 
prepositions has also motivated the emergence of a few dedicated logical 
frameworks and reasoning procedures.

Languages like English have phrasal verbs, and these combinations
of verbs and prepositions (in prepositional verbs or verb-particle
constructions), have also been the subject of considerable effort, going from
techniques for their automatic extraction from corpora, to methods for the
determination of their semantics.  Other languages, like Romance languages or
Hindi, either incorporate the preposition or include it in the prepositional
phrase. All these configurations are semantically as well as syntactically of
much interest. 

In NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have attracted a lot of attention, with 
different machine learning techniques having been employed with
varying degrees of success. 

In this context, a successful workshop on prepositions was held in Toulouse, 
in September 2003, with papers presenting research in a wide variety of 
topics, examining prepositions in languages like French, English, German 
and Japanese, some from a more computational approach and others more 
linguistic. 

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on 
prepositions from a variety of backgrounds, such as linguistics, NLP, AI and 
psycholinguistics, providing a forum for discussing, among others, the syntax, 
semantics, description, representation and computational applications of 
prepositions, with the ultimate aim to advance the state-of-the-art, identify 
challenges, and promote future collaborations among researchers interested 
in the different aspects of prepositions. 

Submissions

We welcome papers describing original work on prepositions, preferably that
can inform computational applications. We especially encourage submissions on
the following topics:

- Aspects of the syntax and semantics of prepositions:
prepositions in alternations, syntactic and semantic restrictions. General
syntactic-semantic principles. Postpositions or other equivalent markers (e.g.
case). Prepositions in constructions (phrasal verbs, determinerless PPs, etc)

- Polysemy of prepositions, identification and classification of preposition
senses, contrastive uses, metaphorical uses, semantic and cognitive foundations
for prepositions.

- Descriptions: 
prepositions in lexical resources (WordNet, Framenet), productive versus 
collocations uses, multi-lingual descriptions (mismatches, incorporation, 
divergences), prepositions and thematic roles.

-Applications: 
dealing with prepositions in applications e.g. for Machine Translation, 
Information extraction, Language Generation.

- Representation of Prepositions: 
prepositions in knowledge bases, cognitive or logic-based formalisms for 
the description of the semantics of prepositions (in isolation, and in 
composition/confrontation with the verb and the NP), compositional
semantics. Implications for AI, KR. 

- Prepositions in reasoning procedures:
how different kinds of preposition provide distinct challenges to a reasoning
system and how they can be handled.

- Cognitive dimensions of prepositions:
how different kinds of prepositions are acquired/interpreted/represented, in
terms of human and/or computational processing.

Submissions should not exceed 8 pages and they must be in .ps or .pdf 
formats. The 12 point Times New Roman font is preferred, leave about 2.5 cm 
margins on both sides. More precise formatting instructions will be given for 
final versions, since a book publication is under preparation. Papers must be 
sent in electronic form to: prep05 at essex.ac.uk.

Deadlines

Submission deadline:  January 10th, 2005
Notification to authors:  Feb 15th, 2005
Final paper due:  March 19th, 2005

Registration:

Registration fees will be kept as low as possible.

Programme Committee:

Anne Abeille  (Université Paris 7, France)
Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Italy)
Markus Egg  (Saarland University, Germany)
Sonja Eisenbeiss  (University of Essex, UK)
Christiane Fellbaum  (Princeton University, USA)
Anette Frank  (DFKI, Germany)
Daniele Godard  (Université Paris 7, France)
Tracy King  (PARC, USA)
Valia Kordoni (Saarland University, Germany)
Paola Merlo  (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Gertjan van Noord  (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Anna Papafragou (University of Delaware, USA)
Henk van Riemsdijk  (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
Louisa Sadler  (University of Essex, UK)
Patrick Saint Dizier (IRIT, France)
Hidetosi Sirai  (Chukyo University, Japan)
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Aline Villavicencio  (University of Essex, UK)
Tom Wasow  (Stanford University, USA)
Emile van der Zee  (University of Lincoln, UK)
Joost Zwarts  (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)

Contacts:

Submissions and inquiries : prep05 at essex.ac.uk 

Local organizing committee :
Aline Villavicencio (workshop chair)
Louisa Sadler 
Valia Kordoni

Website:  http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~avill/Prep05.html

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:58:33
From: Nils Langer < nils.langer at bris.ac.uk >
Subject: Language History from Below 

	Full Title: Language History from Below: Linguistic Variation in the Germanic 
Languages from 1700 to 2000 

Date: 06-Apr-2005 - 09-Apr-2005
Location: Bristol, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Nils Langer
Meeting Email: nils.langer at bris.ac.uk
Web Site: http://www.bris.ac.uk/depts/German/languagehistory.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics 

Language Family(ies): Germanic 

Call Deadline: 31-Oct-2004 

Meeting Description:

Language History from Below -
Linguistic Variation in the Germanic Languages from 1700 to 2000
University of Bristol, ENGLAND
April 6-9, 2005

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

Guest Speakers
Ana Deumert (Monash, Melbourne)
David Denison (Manchester)
Ernst Håkon Jahr (Kristiansand)
Angelika Linke (Zürich)

In a teleological and isolationist approach to the ''big'' languages, the
traditional historiography of the Germanic languages has usually focused on
standard or prestige varieties. This conference will seek to develop an
alternative perspective: the view ''from below'', i.e. the description and
explanation of developments within and between these languages in the last 300
years, i.e. roughly since the beginnings of standardisation efforts. On the
basis of data hitherto ignored or neglected in language historiography, the
question will be addressed to what extent non-prestigious varieties and writers
form an important part of the history of Germanic languages. The organisers
will
particularly welcome corpus-based contributions to the development of
alternative approaches, new sources of data and new topics of interest, such as
the following:

Approaches:
social identity, social networks, and individual speakers/writers
communicative patterns of discourse
gender-based variation
contact-induced phenomena	

Sources:
ego-documents (private letter correspondence, diaries)
administrative and legal texts
functional texts (cooking books, instruction manuals, inventories)
pamphlets and newspapers

Topics:
literacy vs. orality
schooled vs. unschooled speech and writing
prescriptivism and norm codification
linguistic continuities and changes in speech communities
cross-linguistic similarities and diachronic differences

Please send your abstract of 250 words by October 31st, 2004 either by email
(preferred) or post to Nils Langer, Dept of German, 21 Woodland Road, Bristol,
BS8 1TE
nils.langer at bris.ac.uk

Website:
http://www.bris.ac.uk/depts/German/languagehistory.html

Organisers
Nils Langer (Bristol)   
Stephan Elspa? (M?nster)  
Joachim Scharloth (Z?rich)
Wim Vandenbussche (Brussel)

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