18.407, Calls: Comp Ling/Czech Republic; Gen Ling/Switzerland

Tue Feb 6 19:33:26 UTC 2007

LINGUIST List: Vol-18-407. Tue Feb 06 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.407, Calls: Comp Ling/Czech Republic; Gen Ling/Switzerland

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1)
Date: 01-Feb-2007
From: Violetta Cavalli-Sforza < violetta at cs.cmu.edu >
Subject: Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages Workshop 

2)
Date: 01-Feb-2007
From: Elwys De Stefani < elwys.destefani at unine.ch >
Subject: Proper Names in Spoken Language 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 14:30:24
From: Violetta Cavalli-Sforza < violetta at cs.cmu.edu >
Subject: Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages Workshop 

Full Title: Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages Workshop 

Date: 28-Jun-2007 - 28-Jun-2007
Location: Prague, Czech Republic 
Contact Person: Violetta Cavalli-Sforza
Meeting Email: violetta at cs.cmu.edu
Web Site: http://www.cs.um.edu.mt/~mros/casl07 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 11-Mar-2007 

Meeting Description:

This workshop seeks to attract work on resources and tools that span the range
of the Semitic language family as well as work on specific Semitic languages. It
will also be a meeting for the newly formed ACL SEMITIC SIG. 

Call for Papers
ACL 2007 Workshop on

Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages: 
Common Issues and Resources

28th June, 2007, Prague, Czech Republic
Submission deadline: 11 March 2007

Workshop Website: http://www.cs.um.edu.mt/~mros/casl07

The ACL 2007 Workshop on ''Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages: Common
Issues and Resources'' will be held in conjunction with the 45th Annual Meeting
of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and will take place on June
28th in Prague, Czech Republic.  

Scope and Topics:

The Semitic family includes many languages and dialects spoken by a large 
number of native speakers (around 300 million). However, Semitic languages 
as a whole are still understudied. The most prominent members of this family 
are Arabic and its dialects, Hebrew, Amharic, Aramaic, Maltese and Syriac. 
Their shared ancestry is apparent through pervasive cognate sharing, a rich 
and productive pattern-based morphology, and similar syntactic constructions. 
An increasing body of computational linguistics work is starting to appear 
for both Arabic and Hebrew. Arabic alone, as the largest member of the Semitic
family, has been receiving much attention lately via dedicated workshops and
conferences. Tools and resources for other Semitic languages are being created
at a slower rate. While corpora and some tools are necessarily
language-specific, ideally there should be more cross-fertilization among
research and development efforts for different Semitic languages.  

The proposed workshop aims to bring together researchers working on Semitic
languages to share and discuss common issues and approaches to the processing of
these languages. We invite submissions on all Semitic languages, including work
describing recent state-of-the-art NLP systems and work leveraging resource and
tool creation for the Semitic language family.  We especially welcome
submissions on work that crosses individual language boundaries and heightens
awareness amongst Semitic-language researchers of shared challenges and common
solutions. The workshop will also include a meeting of the Special Interest
Group on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages (the ACL SIG). 
Examples of topics include, but are not limited to:
- Computational approaches to phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics   and
pragmatics of Semitic languages
- Tools for processing of Semitic languages (e.g. POS taggers, parsers, etc.)
- Computational resources for Semitic languages
- Comparative computational studies of Semitic languages
- Leveraging resources in other languages (Semitic or other) to create 
resources and tools for Semitic languages
- Empirical studies of unique/specific phenomena in Semitic languages
- Text and speech applications for Semitic languages such as:
  - speech recognition,
  - machine translation, 
  - summarization, 
  - language generation,
  - speech synthesis,
  - co-reference resolution, 
  - mention detection, 
  - information retrieval,
  - spoken dialog applications
  - etc.

Submissions:

Authors are invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in 
the topic area of this workshop. Submissions should not exceed 8 pages and 
should be formatted using the ACL 2007 style files, which are available at: 
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles/
The reviewing of the papers will be blind and the papers should not include 
the authors' names and affiliations. Each submission will be reviewed by at 
least two members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published 
in the workshop proceedings.  Papers should be submitted electronically, no 
later than March 11, 2007. The only accepted format for submitted papers is 
Adobe PDF.

Important Dates:

March 11  --  Submission deadline for workshop papers
April 11  --  Notification of acceptance
April 29  --  Camera-ready version due
June 28   --  Workshop held at ACL 2007

Co-Chairs and Organizers:

Violetta Cavalli-Sforza (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) - violetta at cs.cmu.edu
Imed Zitouni (IBM Research, USA) - izitouni at us.ibm.com

Program Committee:

Sherif Mahdy Abdou (Cairo University, Egypt)
Yaser Al-Onaizan (IBM, USA)  
Ann Bies (LDC/University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Malek Boualem (France Telecom, France)
Tim Buckwalter (LDC/University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Achraf Chalabi (Sakhr Software Co., Egypt)
Anne DeRoeck (Open University, UK.)
Mona Diab (Columbia University, USA)
Joseph Dichy (University of Lyon 2, France)
Abdelhamid ElJihad (Institut d'Etudes et Recherches sur l'Arabisation, Morocco) 
Martha W. Evens (Illinois Institute of Technology, USA)
Ali Farghaly (Oracle, USA)
Alexander Fraser (USC/ISI, USA) 
Andrew Freeman (Washington University, USA)
Nizar Habash (Columbia University, USA)
Alon Itai (Technion/Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
Steven Krauwer (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
Mohamed F. Noamany (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Uzzi Ornan  (Technion, Israel)
Slim Ouni (LORIA/University of Nancy 2, France)
Mike Rosner (University of Malta, Malta)
Khalil Sima'an (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Abdelhadi Soudi (Ecole Nationale de l'Industrie Minérale, Morocco)
Shuly Wintner (University of Haifa, Israel)
Mustafa Yaseen (Amman University, Jordan)
Abdellah Yousfi (Institut d'Etudes et Recherches sur l'Arabisation, Morocco)

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 14:30:31
From: Elwys De Stefani < elwys.destefani at unine.ch >
Subject: Proper Names in Spoken Language 

Full Title: Proper Names in Spoken Language 
Short Title: nomina2007 

Date: 22-Nov-2007 - 23-Nov-2007
Location: Basle, Switzerland 
Contact Person: Nicolas Pepin
Meeting Email: nomina2007 at unibas.ch
Web Site: http://franz.unibas.ch/nomina2007 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-May-2007 

Meeting Description

Four years after the conference on the social aspects of proper names held in
Zurich and organized by the Swiss Association for Applied Linguistics
(Vals/Asla), the Institute for French Studies at the University of Basle invites
you to participate in the international conference Proper Names in Spoken
Language. The conference aims to gather researchers from different horizons to
confront their conceptions, approaches and methods. The conference should permit
to scientifically assess the uses and functions of proper names in spoken
language in order to generate a dynamic research on that topic. Papers based on
the analysis of authentic spoken data are therefore particularly welcome. 

Despite few sporadic publications, research on proper names in spoken language
is not very developed. There is a considerable lack of knowledge about the
functions proper names accomplish in social interactions. Moreover, there is no
unanimously accepted definition of what a proper name is. 
On the one hand, onomastics, with exceptions, adopts an indifferent stance
towards orality; and the various linguistic approaches predominantly work with
written corpora. On the other hand, research on interaction does not
specifically treat the notion of proper names, which is generally absent also
from sociolinguistics, a fortiori when it comes to analyzing spoken language.
Moreover, there is only little communication between the different approaches or
paradigms, leading to an awkward situation in which publications in one
discipline are often unknown to other domains.
However, it seems possible to create links between researchers working with
different approaches and with divergent interests with regard to orality. The
conference aims to explore the various points of view which allow a linguistic
characterization of proper names in orality, the role of context and social
variety, as well as the analysis of spoken corpora, resulting in an increased
understanding of the way in which proper names are used in interaction. 

Aims

Five lines of research will be taken into consideration for the selection of the
submissions:

1. Proper names in spoken language: Linguistic descriptions of proper names in
spoken language, in one language or in various languages (contrastive approach),
especially within morphosyntax, semantics and prosody. 

2. Sociolinguistics matters: Proper names in monolingual, bilingual and
plurilingual situations; proper names and identity; naming conflicts; proper
names in intercultural communications. 

3. Pragmatics of proper names: The role of proper names in the organization of
interaction; reference, the different possibilities of referring to a discourse
object and/or to an extralinguistic object; proper names and multimodality.

4. Conceptualizing proper names: The theoretical and practical consequences of
orality-oriented approaches on the conceptualization and definition of proper names.

5. Methodological issues: The retrieval of proper names in computational
linguistics; problems that the anonymization of proper names causes in discourse
analysis and conversation analysis; the resulting methodological and analytical
questions; the transfer of proper names from their natural context to the
scientific contexts; the treatment of proper names with a view to onomastic
publications.

Deadline

Proposals are expected by May 15, 2007. Submissions should consist of a brief
abstract (maximum 500 words including the title) in word, rtf or pdf formats. A
separate document including the authors' first names, last names and e-mail
addresses and specifying the line of research chosen for the proposal should be
sent together with the abstract. Proposals should be sent as attachments via
e-mail to: nomina2007 at unibas.ch. You will receive a confirmation e-mail upon
your abstract submission. If you do not receive a confirmation, please contact
us as soon as possible. Notification of acceptance or non-acceptance will be
sent to you around June 30, 2007 at the latest.

Registration

A registration module will be activated on the site
http://franz.unibas.ch/nomina2007 in June 2006.

Languages

Papers will be given in one of the following languages: French, English, German,
Italian. 45-minute slots will be available for presentations (30 minutes + 15
minutes discussion).

Organization committee

Dr. Nicolas Pepin (University of Basle)
Dr. Elwys De Stefani (University of Neuchâtel & CNRS Lyon (UMR 5191 ICAR))
Prof. Dr. Georges Lüdi (University of Basle)
Eva Askari (University of Basle)
David Jäger (University of Basle)

Scientific committee

Dr. Terhi Ainiala (University of Helsinki & Research Institute for the Languages
of Finland)
Prof. Dr. Gerd Antos (Martin-Luther University, Halle Wittenberg)
PD Dr. Hans Bickel (University of Basle)
Dr. Elwys De Stefani (University of Neuchâtel & CNRS Lyon (UMR 5191 ICAR))
Prof. Dr. Andres Kristol (University of Basle & University of Neuchâtel)
Dr. Sarah Leroy (UMR 7114 MoDyCo, CNRS & University Paris X - Nanterre)
Prof. Dr. Georges Lüdi (University of Basle)
Dr. Nicolas Pepin (University of Basle)
Prof. Dr. Johannes Schwitalla (University of Würzburg)

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