18.587, Calls: Historical Linguistics/Canada; Computational Linguistics/USA

Thu Feb 22 17:58:46 UTC 2007

LINGUIST List: Vol-18-587. Thu Feb 22 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.587, Calls: Historical Linguistics/Canada; Computational Linguistics/USA

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1)
Date: 21-Feb-2007
From: Ioanna Sitaridou < is269 at cam.ac.uk >
Subject: Towards realistic models of contact-induced change 

2)
Date: 21-Feb-2007
From: Elena Kozerenko < kozerenko at mail.ru >
Subject: Intelligent Linguistic Technologies 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:50:38
From: Ioanna Sitaridou < is269 at cam.ac.uk >
Subject: Towards realistic models of contact-induced change  

Full Title: Towards realistic models of contact-induced change 

Date: 06-Aug-2007 - 11-Aug-2007
Location: Montreal, Canada 
Contact Person: Ioanna Sitaridou
Meeting Email: ICHL2007 at uqam.ca, is269 at cam.ac.uk, mt217 at uiuc.edu
Web Site: http://www.ichl2007.uqam.ca/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2007 

Meeting Description
Last Call for papers: Towards realistic models of contact-induced change:
mapping psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors, XVIII International
Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 2007), Université du Québec à
Montréal, Montréal, Canada, 6 - 11 August 2007 

Workshop 
Towards realistic models of contact-induced change: mapping psycholinguistic and
sociolinguistic factors.

Traditionally, language contact is considered to be a possible trigger of
diachronic change whereby two or more languages/dialects in a contact situation
influence each other (cf. Thomason 2001). Nevertheless, the precise mechanics of
this influence remain to be worked out.
	From a psycholinguistic perspective, it is not clear at all how language
contact may trigger change. As a matter of fact, this ought to be impossible, at
least a priori, since a sociolinguistic view considers 'language' as a social
product and not as the 'mental object' of the individual (cf. Lightfoot 1999).
In order to bridge the gap between the fact that language contact can indeed
trigger language change and the 'internalist' restrictions, namely that the
locus of change is the individual, Kroch & Taylor (1997) proposed the concept of
'competing grammars'. This notion, however, is claimed to be extremely fuzzy
from an acquisitionist perspective because of the mass of evidence pointing
towards lack of significant interference in bilinguals (cf. Meisel 2001a, 2001b;
Müller 2003).
	Moreover, the notion of competition between grammars can be difficult to pin
down sociolinguistically. From a sociolinguistic perspective, contact typically
involves two or more varieties/languages which are hardly ever interchangeable
on all levels (cf., e.g., Ferguson 1959). Differences in degree of
standardisation, literacy of speakers, and prestige are only some of the factors
affecting preference for one variety over another in situations such as
colonisation, immigration, and diglossia. This creates further restrictions,
this time of an 'external' nature. Moreover, such restrictions cannot be
relegated to secondary status, merely filtering the outcome of competition at
the structural level. Normative or otherwise broadly social considerations may
pre-empt the possibility for competition itself to arise, if choices already
made by society exclude some potential realisations as 'ungrammatical', or if
contact between the two varieties is limited to only some linguistic
environments and the concomitant structures found therein. In this context, the
sense in which the corresponding grammars may be said to be in competition
remains an open question.
The present workshop seeks to provide answers to the following questions:

(a)	What constraints do the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic findings
jointly place on a realistic model of contact-induced change?
(b)	Can change induced by language contact be modelled as a change in grammars,
and -- if yes -- in what way?
(c)	How do social factors enter into this process of change, and how can we
model their influence in a consistent way?
(d)	What type of empirical evidence is available to prove or disprove the causal
relation between language contact and language change, given the limitations of
diachronic studies, e.g. the absence of native speakers who may offer
grammaticality judgments?

Last Call for Papers
We encourage submission of abstracts for papers addressing any of the topics
mentioned above. Papers should explicitly draw theoretical implications from
their findings regarding the nature of contact-induced language change. 

There will be 7 slots for papers. In addition, there will be 3 invited talks
(Brian Joseph, Georg Kaiser, Donald Tuten). Presentations of papers will have
the usual 20 min + 10 min discussion format. We plan to publish selected
proceedings with an international publishing house.

The deadline for submission of abstracts for papers (20 min. + 10 min. for
discussion) is March 1, 2007, and decisions will be emailed to authors by April
15. Abstracts should be submitted on: http://www.ichl2007.uqam.ca/en/index.asp

Conveners
Ioanna Sitaridou, University of Cambridge, is269 at cam.ac.uk
Marina Terkourafi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, mt217 at uiuc.edu

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:50:46
From: Elena Kozerenko < kozerenko at mail.ru >
Subject: Intelligent Linguistic Technologies 

Full Title: Intelligent Linguistic Technologies 
Short Title: ILINTEC'07 

Date: 25-Jun-2007 - 28-Jun-2007
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, USA 
Contact Person: Elena Kozerenko
Meeting Email: kozerenko at mail.ru
Web Site: http://www.ipiran.ru/conference/Ilintec07/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 05-Mar-2007 

Meeting Description

Monte Carlo Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
June, 25-28, 2007
http://www.ipiran.ru/conference/Ilintec07/
The International Workshop on Intelligent Linguistic Technologies ILINTEC'07
will be held as part of the ICAI'07 Conference (International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence). 
All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings by CSREA
Press (Computer Science Research, Education and Advanced Technologies Association).

The core idea of ILINTEC'07 is to bring together researchers who explore
different paradigms of language and speech processing; special emphasis is laid
on interaction of stochastic techniques and logical methods. ILINTEC'07 is a
unique opportunity to discuss the problems of natural language processing in
immediate contact with the leading research and development teams from
universities and industry engaged in information technology projects and various
fields of Computer Science. 

The scope of the workshop

The workshop is centered around - but not limited to - the topics given below:
-	machine translation;
-	text retrieval;
-	Information extraction;
-	applications of machine learning to speech and language  processing;
-	neural networks for speech and language structures recognition;
-	algorithms or morphological and syntactic analysis of natural languages;
-	word class and part-of-speech tagging text corpora;
-	parsing with context-free grammars, etc;
-	lexicalized and probabilistic parsing;
-	meaning representation, semantic analysis;
-	word sense disambiguation and information retrieval;
-	reference resolution;
-	natural language generation;

ILINTEC'07 program committee

Prof. Sebastian Shaumyan, (Program Committee Chair), Yale University, New Haven,
USA 
Dr. Elena Kozerenko (Chair of the ILINTEC'07 Workshop), Institute for
Informatics Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Prof. Vladimir Arlazarov, Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of
Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Dr. Konstantin Bogatyrev, Universal Dialog, Inc., USA
Dr. Michael Charnine, Keywen Corporation, Canada
Dr. Mike Dillinger, Spoken Translation, Inc., USA
Prof. Alexander Gelbukh, National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), Mexico
Prof. Alexander Kibrik, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
Prof. Irene Kobozeva, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
Prof. Ruslan Mitkov, Wolverhampton University, UK 
Dr. Alexander Narinyani, Russian Research Institute for AI, Moscow, Russia 
Prof. Alexander Zubov, Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus

Submission

Important dates

March, 5, 2007: Draft papers due
March 21, 2007: Notification of acceptance
April 20, 2007: Camera-Ready papers & Prereg. due
June 25-28, 2007: ILINTEC'07 (as part of the MLMTA'06 and the 2006 World
Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing)

The draft papers (about 4-5 pages) are due by March 12, 2007; and are to be sent
by e-mail to the Chair of the ILINTEC'07 Workshop: 

Dr. Elena B. Kozerenko kozerenko at mail.ru
Institute for Informatics Problems of the Russian Academy
of Sciences, 119333 Moscow, Vavilova Str., 44/2, Russia

The first page of the draft paper should include for each author
title of the paper,
name,
affiliation,
postal address, 
email address, 
telephone number & fax number,
the name of the author who will be presenting the paper (if accepted)
5 keywords (maximum). 

The length of the Camera-Ready papers (if accepted) will be limited to 7 (IEEE
style) pages. Papers must not have been previously published or currently
submitted for publication elsewhere.

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