19.634, Calls: Computational Ling/UK; Phonology/Canada

Mon Feb 25 18:40:16 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-634. Mon Feb 25 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.634, Calls: Computational Ling/UK; Phonology/Canada

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1)
Date: 24-Feb-2008
From: Sabine Schulte im Walde < schulte at ims.uni-stuttgart.de >
Subject: Coling 2008 Workshop on Human Judgements in CL 

2)
Date: 23-Feb-2008
From: Charles Reiss < reiss at alcor.concordia.ca >
Subject: Fifth North American Phonology Conference

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:37:20
From: Sabine Schulte im Walde [schulte at ims.uni-stuttgart.de]
Subject: Coling 2008 Workshop on Human Judgements in CL
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-634.html&submissionid=170501&topicid=3&msgnumber=1  

Full Title: Coling 2008 Workshop on Human Judgements in CL 
Short Title: hjcl 

Date: 23-Aug-2008 - 24-Aug-2008
Location: Manchester, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Sabine Schulte im Walde
Meeting Email: schulte at ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Web Site: http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/hjcl/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 05-May-2008 

Meeting Description:

Coling 2008 workshop on human judgements in Computational Linguistics

Manchester, UK
23 or 24 August 2008 (to be determined)

http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/hjcl/ 

Call for Papers

Human judgements play a key role in the development and the assessment of
linguistic resources and methods in Computational Linguistics. They are commonly
used in the creation of lexical resources and corpus annotation, and also in the
evaluation of automatic approaches to linguistic tasks. Furthermore,
systematically collected human judgements provide clues for research on
linguistic issues that underlie the judgement task, providing insights
complementary to introspective analysis or evidence gathered from corpora.

We invite papers about experiments that collect human judgements for
Computational Linguistic purposes, with a particular focus on linguistic tasks
that are controversial from a theoretical point of view (e.g., some coding tasks
having to do with semantics or pragmatics). Such experimental tasks are usually
difficult to design and interpret, and they typically result in mediocre
inter-rater reliability. We seek both broad methodological papers discussing
these issues, and specific case studies.

Topic of interest include, but are not limited to:
1. Experimental design:
- Which types of experiments support the collection of human judgements? Can any
general guidelines be defined? Is there a preference between lab-based
experiments and web-based experiments?
- Which experimental methodologies support controversial tasks? For instance,
does underspecification help? What is the role of ambiguity and polysemy in
these tasks?
- What is the appropriate level of granularity for the category labels?
- What kind of participants should be used (e.g., expert vs. non-expert), how is
it affected by the type of experiment, and how should the experiment design be
varied according to this issue?
- How much and which kind of information (examples, context, etc.) should be
provided to the experiment participants? When does information turn into a bias?
- Is it possible to design experiments that are useful for both computational
linguistics and psycholinguistics? What do the two research areas have in
common? What are the differences?

2. Analysis and interpretation of experimental data:
- How important is inter-annotator agreement in human judgement collection
experiments? How is it best measured for complex tasks?
- What other quantitative tools are useful for analysing human judgement
collection experiments?
- What qualitative methods are useful for analysing human judgement collection
experiments? Which questions should be asked? Is it possible to formulate
general guidelines?
- How is the analysis similar to psycholinguistic analysis? How is it different?
- How do results from all of the methods above affect the development of
annotation instructions and procedures?

3. Application of experiment insights:
- How do the experimental data fit into the general resource-creating process?
- How to modify the set of labels and the criteria or guidelines for the
annotation task according to the experimental results? How to avoid circularity
in this process?
- How can the data be used to refine or modify existing theoretical proposals?
- More generally, under what conditions can the obtained judgements be applied
to research questions?

Organisers:
Ron Artstein, Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California
Gemma Boleda, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Frank Keller, University of Edinburgh
Sabine Schulte im Walde, Universität Stuttgart

Keynote Speaker:
Martha Palmer, University of Colorado

Programme Committee:
Toni Badia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra 
Marco Baroni, University of Trento 
Beata Beigman Klebanov, Northwestern University 
André Blessing, Universität Stuttgart
Chris Brew, Ohio State University 
Kevin Cohen, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center 
Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago 
Katrin Erk, University of Texas at Austin 
Stefan Evert, University of Osnabrück 
Afsaneh Fazly, University of Toronto 
Alex Fraser, Universität Stuttgart 
Jesus Gimenez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya 
Roxana Girju, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Ed Hovy, University of Southern California 
Nancy Ide, Vassar College 
Adam Kilgarriff, University of Brighton 
Alexander Koller, University of Edinburgh 
Anna Korhonen, University of Cambridge 
Mirella Lapata, University of Edinburgh 
Diana McCarthy, University of Sussex 
Alissa Melinger, University of Dundee 
Paola Merlo, University of Geneva 
Sebastian Padó, Stanford University 
Martha Palmer, University of Colorado 
Rebecca Passonneau, Columbia University 
Massimo Poesio, University of Trento 
Sameer Pradhan, BBN Technologies 
Horacio Rodriguez, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya 
Bettina Schrader, Universität Potsdam 
Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto 

Submission:
Deadline for the receipt of papers is 5 May 2008, 23:59 UTC. For
submission information see the following web page:
http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/hjcl/submission.html

Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: 5 May 2008
Notification of acceptance: 10 June 2008
Camera-ready copy due: 1 July 2008
Workshop date: 23 or 24 August 2008 (to be determined)

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:37:29
From: Charles Reiss [reiss at alcor.concordia.ca]
Subject: Fifth North American Phonology Conference
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-634.html&submissionid=170401&topicid=3&msgnumber=2 

Full Title: Fifth North American Phonology Conference 
Short Title: NAPhC5 

Date: 09-May-2008 - 11-May-2008
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada 
Contact Person: Charles Reiss
Meeting Email: cogsci at alcor.concordia.ca
Web Site: http://linguistics.concordia.ca/naphc5/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Phonology 

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2008 

Meeting Description:

Fifth North American Phonology Conference
Concordia University, Montreal

Theme: Phonology as Symbolic Computation

May 9-11, 2008 

Last Call for Papers

Fifth North American Phonology Conference

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2008

Invited Speakers:
Andries Coetzee, Michigan
John Kingston, UMass
David Odden, Ohio State
Bridget Samuels, Harvard

Recent work in phonology has met with a number of recalcitrant problems.

1. Probabilistic and exemplar-based models of phonological learning and
phonological computation have failed to deal with the same conceptual and
empirical challenges that led to the demise of their empiricist, behaviorist
forebears.

2. Objections against the computational complexity associated with derivations
with multiple levels of representation have turned out to have been
ill-grounded, and stubborn problems of analysis have forced 'two-level'
theorists to allow complex derivations to sneak back in, as in the Stratal,
Harmonic Serialism and Candidate Chains models of recent work in Optimality Theory.

3. The grounding of constraints in markedness 'theory' remains an elusive goal
that fails on both logical and empirical grounds to provide explanations.

In this context, we invite papers on the prospects of future research in Good
Old Fashioned Phonology (GOFP, an adaptation of Haugeland's Good Old Fashioned
Artificial Intelligence). That is, we propose an exploration of phonology as a
substance-free, symbolic computation system. Papers critiquing GOFP are also
very welcome.

A substance-free theory considers the formal properties of a grammar without
regard for transduction between symbols in the grammar and the input and output
systems involved in language acquisition and use. Relevant sources for this
position in phonology and elsewhere are Hjelmslev and Uldall (see Fudge
2006:88), Chomsky and Halle (1968), Kaplan 1987, Hale and Reiss (2000, 2008) and
Pylyshyn (2003).

Formal topics might include the use of quantifiers or operator-variable
structures, computation of locality, computational power of phonological
grammars, and formal grammar and biolinguistic considerations.

Abstracts should be sent in pdf format to cogsci at alcor.concordia.ca, up to 3
pages in length. Anonymity is not required.

Deadline: March 1, 2008

Organizers:
Concordia Linguistics Program http://linguistics.concordia.ca
Concordia Linguistics Student Association http://linguistics.concordia.ca/lsa/
Concordia Cognitive Science Group http://linguistics.concordia.ca/ccsg/
Computational Linguistics at Concordia http://www.cs.concordia.ca/CLAC/

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