29.4042, Calls: Anthro Ling, Applied Ling, Comp Ling, Hist Ling, Lang Doc/Germany
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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4042. Wed Oct 17 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 29.4042, Calls: Anthro Ling, Applied Ling, Comp Ling, Hist Ling, Lang Doc/Germany
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Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2018 14:35:25
From: Johann-Mattis List [mattis.list at shh.mpg.de]
Subject: Computer-assisted Approaches in Historical and Typological Language Comparison
Full Title: Computer-assisted Approaches in Historical and Typological Language Comparison
Short Title: CALC
Date: 21-Aug-2019 - 24-Aug-2019
Location: Leipzig, Germany
Contact Person: Johann-Mattis List
Meeting Email: mattis.list at shh.mpg.de
Web Site: http://calc.digling.org/events/calls/calc-sle-cfp.pdf
Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Language Documentation
Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2018
Meeting Description:
(Session of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea)
Workshop Description:
By comparing the languages of the world historically, we can gain invaluable
insights into human prehistory. By comparing them typologically, we can gain
invaluable insights into the fundamentals of perception and cognition. The
classical methods for historical and typological language comparison date back
to the early 19th century and have been constantly refined and improved since
then. Thanks to the comparative method for historical language comparison,
linguists have made ground-breaking insights into language change in general
and into the history of many specific language families in specific (Campbell
and Poser 2008), and external evidence has often confirmed the validity of the
findings (McMahon 2005). Thanks to large-scale approaches to typological
comparison (Greenberg 1963; Dryer and Haspelmath 2013), we have gained many
new insights into ''universal'' patterns recurring independently across the
world's languages.
With increasing amounts of data, however, the methods to prepare, compare, and
analyze data, which are largely based on manual labor, reach their practical
limits. As a result, scholars are now increasingly trying to automatize
different aspects of the classical comparative method in historical
linguistics (Kondrak 2000; Prokić, Wieling, and Nerbonne 2009; List 2014), or
to automatize the retrieval of typological information (Bender 2017; Malaviya
et al. 2017). On the other hand, the last decade has seen a large number of
attempts to analyze cross-linguistic data statistically, be it to uncover
universal factors that shape linguistic diversity independently of language
history (Everett et al. 2015; Blasi et al. 2016), to gain insights into the
past of specific language families (Bouckaert et al. 2012; Chang et al. 2015),
to understand the dynamics underlying lexical and grammatical evolution
(Greenhill et al. 2017), or to arrive at a better understanding of areal
factors in language history (Cathcard et al. 2018).
Purely computational applications, however, are not capable of replacing
experts' experience and intuition, and given that most of the computational
methods for data preparation still largely lag behind human judgments, it is
not surprising that most of the computational analyses still rely on manually
annotated data. In a situation where computers cannot replace experts and
experts do not have enough time to analyze the increasing amounts of data, a
new framework, neither completely computer-driven, nor ignorant of the help
computers provide, becomes urgent. Such frameworks are well-established in
biology and translation, where computational tools cannot provide the accuracy
needed to arrive at convincing results, but do assist humans to digest large
data sets.
What is important for a successful application of computer-assisted methods
are the detailed workflows that experts use to retrieve and analyze
information both quantitatively and qualitatively. Since they usually require
a complicated mixture of programming using different software packages, data
annotation using different formats, and statistical analysis using different
models, computer-assisted approaches are not (yet) easy to apply, especially
for scholars with little experience in programming or data handling. What
further exacerbates the more widespread sharing and reuse of computational and
computer-assisted approaches that have been proposed in the past is that the
information provided in the articles that discuss them is usually very sparse.
By bringing together scholars from the classical and the computational camps,
we hope to foster a closer future collaboration that integrates both
quantitative and qualitative approaches.
Call for papers
The workshop invites papers that deal with computer-assisted (as opposed to
pure computational or pure qualitative) approaches to historical and
typological language comparison. Computer-assisted approaches are hereby
understood as procedures involving different stages of qualitative and
quantitative data analysis, ranging from the initial preparation of lexical or
structural data, via automatic or manual annotation, up to qualitative or
quantitative analysis, that yield a specific result, be it a linguistic
reconstruction system linking proto-forms to aligned reflexes, a phylogeny
that lists inferred word histories, or tools for exploratory data analysis. By
focusing on computer-assisted approaches, we hope to foster a more intensive
collaboration between classical and computational linguists. In addition to
detailed descriptions of concrete tasks in historical and typological
language comparison, we also encourage submissions dealing with data standards
enhancing data sharing and reuse, as well as the presentation of purely
qualitative approaches for which no computational solutions exist so far.
By bringing together scholars from the classical and the computational camps,
we hope to foster a closer future collaboration that integrates both
quantitative and qualitative approaches. Topics for papers include (but are
not limited to):
- Computer-assisted approaches to study language contact in specific
linguistic areas.
- Computer-assisted approaches to study language history in form of networks
of phylogenies.
- Papers discussing the compilation of large annotated datasets in historical
linguistics and language typology.
- Workflows for linguistic reconstruction (phonology, lexicon, syntax).
- Tools for exploratory data analysis in historical linguistics and language
typology.
- Standards and best practices for data curation and reuse.
- Qualitative workflows and computer-assisted cases studies.
- Presentation of linguistic problems for which only qualitative workflows
exist so far.
We ask you to send 300-word abstracts in editable non-anonymous form
(preferably LibreOffice, Word, or text format) for the inclusion in the
workshop proposal to mattis.list at shh.mpg.de, by November 15, 2018. Please mark
that you are sending an abstract by adding [SLE-CALC] in the header of your
email.
For a more detailed description of this workshop call, please see here:
http://calc.digling.org/events/calls/calc-sle-cfp.pdf
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