16.1683, Calls: General Ling/South Africa;Comp Ling/Corpus Ling/UK

Thu May 26 23:55:12 UTC 2005

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1683. Thu May 26 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1683, Calls: General Ling/South Africa;Comp Ling/Corpus Ling/UK

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1)
Date: 24-May-2005
From: Benedicte Kusendila < benedicte.kusendila at ua.ac.be >
Subject: MIDP Symposium on Multilingualism and Exclusion 

2)
Date: 25-May-2005
From: Anja Belz < ucnlg at itri.brighton.ac.uk >
Subject: Workshop on Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 19:47:35
From: Benedicte Kusendila < benedicte.kusendila at ua.ac.be >
Subject: MIDP Symposium on Multilingualism and Exclusion 

Full Title: MIDP Symposium on Multilingualism and Exclusion 

Date: 24-Apr-2006 - 26-Apr-2006
Location: Bloemfontein, South Africa 
Contact Person: Nikiwe Matebula
Meeting Email: matebulanp.hum at mail.uovs.ac.za
Web Site: http://www.etfb.org.za 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Sep-2005 

Meeting Description:

Call for papers
Multilingual and Information Development Program (MIDP) Symposium on
Multilingualism and Exclusion
24-26 April 2006, Free State University, Bloemfontein, South Africa

Whether the winds of globalisation, glocalisation and regionalisation of the
last decades have led to more linguistic diversity or not is a matter of
on-going dispute, one reason being the changeable, language-ideological ways in
which language practice is categorised and essentialised into countable
linguistic units. In contrast, it is less controversial that they have led to an
increased visibility and awareness of linguistic diversity, to a growing
sensitivity and sensibility towards it, i.e. to a growing amount and a wider
range of meaning-ascribing discourses surrounding multilingualism. 

The Symposium on Multilingualism and Exclusion wants to draw attention to the
fact that such discourses do not invariably reflect on or give rise to realities
of societal integration and emancipation, but often follow and are followed by
mechanisms and effects of exclusion at different levels of society. Discourses
on language diversity construct this language diversity: they create, reproduce,
naturalise, freeze, or legally enact perceived differences and similarities
across and within languages. It is these constructive mechanisms, and what
societies and political powers do with multilingualism in general, that impinge
directly on the ways citizens can have access to information, can participate in
the distribution of socio-economic resources, can be involved in or affected by
governance and legislation, and can choose their position in a community, their
citizenship and cultural belonging.

The organising committee (in alphabetical order) is composed of:
Pol Cuvelier (University of Antwerp)
Theo du Plessis (Free State University, Bloemfontein, South Africa)
Pieter Duvenage (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South
Africa)
Bénédicte Kusendila (University of Antwerp)
Michael Meeuwis (Ghent University)
Lut Teck (Institute for Higher Education and the Arts, Brussels)
Reinhild Vandekerckhove (University of Antwerp)

The organisers welcome papers offering original theoretical, methodological or
empirical studies of the issue of multilingualism and exclusion. Although the
penchant is for societal approaches, contributions discussing the issue of
exclusion from the viewpoint of individual bi- or multilingualism (e.g. in the
field of psycholinguistics) will offer a welcome balance. The symposium is
organized as part of a research programme that runs in collaboration between
Belgian and South African teams (i.e., the MIDP-III cooperation project), but
the areal scope of the contributions should not be limited to any of these two
regions. 

One-page abstract proposals, mentioning full physical and electronic address
details of all authors as well as an identification of one contact author, are
awaited before 1 September 2005. Notification of acceptance will be given, if
all goes as planned, before 1 December 2005. Papers will not only be selected on
the basis of their internal quality but also with an eye for overall thematical
variety. A selection of the papers will be published as a special issue of the
accredited South African journal Acta Academica. (The possibility of publishing
all the proceedings prior to this is currently being examined). 

Abstracts are to be sent to (hard copy, fax or e-mail attachment):
Ms. Nikiwe Matebula, 
Unit for Language Facilitation and Empowerment
University of the Free State
P.O. Box 339
Bloemfontein 9300 
Republic of South Africa
Telephone number: +2751 4012405 
Fax number: +2751 4483976
e-mail: matebulanp.hum at mail.uovs.ac.za

Please also regularly consult the symposium's website at http://www.etfb.org.za
[Symposium Multilingualism and Exclusion] for continuous information on the
programme, the keynote speakers, accommodation, and others.

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 19:47:39
From: Anja Belz < ucnlg at itri.brighton.ac.uk >
Subject: Workshop on Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation 

Full Title: Workshop on Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation 
Short Title: UCNLG 

Date: 14-Jul-2005 - 14-Jul-2005
Location: Birmingham, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Anja Belz
Meeting Email: ucnlg at itri.brighton.ac.uk
Web Site: http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 27-May-2005 

Meeting Description:

Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation is a pre-conference workshop at
Corpus Linguistics 2005, to be held in Birmingham, 14 July 2005.

We aim to bring together researchers who use corpora for NLG research either in
the traditional, manual way, or automatically, involving machine learning and
statistical methods. The goal of the workshop is to present and discuss current
research, to compare manual and automatic corpus exploitation, to evaluate
achievements, and to identify challenges for the future. 

Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation - Final Call for Papers

We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on all
aspects of using corpora for natural language generation, including, but not
limited to:

     * (Partial) automation of traditional corpus analysis for NLG
     * Issues in annotating corpora for NLG
     * Statistical approaches to deep and/or surface generation
     * Machine learning methods for deep and/or surface generation
     * Role of corpora in the evaluation of NLG systems
     * Reuse of resources developed for NLU (e.g. treebanks) in NLG
     * Domain-specific vs. general purpose corpora for NLG

We would like to emphasise that where we say 'NLG' we mean to include the
language generation components of MT and dialogue systems.

Invited Speaker

Irene Langkilde-Geary (Brigham Young University, Provo, USA) will give an
invited talk with the provisional title: Constraint programming as a Whiteboard
Architecture for Probabilistic NLG.

Panel on Exploiting Corpora for NLG

We will hold a panel discussion on the topics of this workshop. The following
researchers have agreed to join the panel:

Irene Langkilde-Geary, Computer Science, Brigham Young University, USA
Donia Scott, Computing Research Centre, The Open University, UK
Bonnie Webber, Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK
Ehud Reiter, Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, UK
Chris Brew, Linguistics, Ohio State University, USA

Proceedings

The proceedings of the workshop will be published in printed form and
electronically on the web.  We plan to publish selected papers in a special
issue of a suitable journal.

Requirements

Papers should describe original work, emphasizing actual rather than intended
work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported
results. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation of results should be
included. A paper submitted to the Workshop on Using Corpora for NLG cannot have
previously been published. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences
or workshops should indicate this.

Submission information

Reviewing will be based on abstracts, the final proceedings will contain papers
of 4-6 pages.

* Submission of abstracts:

Submissions should be extended abstracts of papers, and should be sent in PDF
format by email to ucnlg at itri.brighton.ac.uk.  Abstracts should not exceed 500
words.  RTF format is also accepted but not encouraged.

Reviewing of papers will be blind. Reviewing will be managed by the workshop's
international programme committee.  Final decisions on the technical programme
will be made by the workshop organisers.

As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and
affiliations.  Self-references that reveal the authors' identity, e.g., ''We
previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...'', should be avoided. Instead, use citations
such as ''Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...''.

In the body of the email submitting the abstract, please include the authors'
names and affiliations, and the paper title.

* Camera-ready full-length papers:

4-6 pages in the IJCAI'05 format. Please follow the IJCAI formatting
instructions (http://ijcai05.csd.abdn.ac.uk/). Further submission instructions
for full-length papers will be included in acceptance emails.

Important dates

Abstract submission deadline: Friday 27th May 2005
Notification of acceptance: Friday 10th June 2005
Camera-ready full-length papers: Friday 1st July 2005
Date of workshop: Thursday 14th July

Programme committee

Anja Belz, ITRI, University of Brighton, UK
John Carroll, Informatics, University of Sussex, UK
Robert Dale, Centre for Language Technology, Macquarie University, Australia
Michel Genereux, ITRI, University of Brighton, UK
Kevin Knight, ISI, University of Southern California, USA
Chris Mellish, Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, UK
Sebastian Varges, ITRI, University of Brighton, UK

Workshop website

http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg/

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