35.352, Summer Schools: Dependency Grammar for Typology (Workshop at ALT 2024) / China

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-352. Wed Jan 31 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.352, Summer Schools: Dependency Grammar for Typology (Workshop at ALT 2024) / China

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Date: 31-Jan-2024
From: Luigi Talamo [luigi.talamo at uni-saarland.de]
Subject: Dependency Grammar for Typology (Workshop at ALT 2024) / China


Dependency Grammar for Typology (Workshop at ALT 2024)

Host Institution: Beijing Normal University

Dates: 08-Nov-2024 - 10-Nov-2024
Location: Zhuhai, Guangdong

Focus: Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

➔       Synchronic comparative studies on variation that can only be
accessed using corpora, such as word order (Levshina 2019, Talamo &
Verkerk 2022);
➔       Comparative studies that employ such resources to uncover
universal principles of grammar, including dependency length
optimization (Futrell, Mahowald & Gibson 2015; Liu 2021, Yingqi, Blasi
& Bickel 2022), word order universals (Choi et al. 2021, Gerdes et al.
2021, Yan & Liu 2023), the memory-surprisal trade-off (Hahn, Degen &
Futrell 2021);
➔       Diachronic studies of language change, such as the evolution
rate of word order in main and subordinate clauses (Jing et al. 2023)
or word order change (Hahn & Xu 2022);
➔       Theoretical challenges in annotation, such as the universality
of syntactic labels, as well as of parts of speech, morpho-syntactic
features, and tokenization (Croft et al. 2017, Osborne & Gerdes 2019,
Sinnemäki and Haakana 2020, Hohn 2021);
➔       Development of new resources, in particular with respect to
low-resource languages, starting from different type of texts
(corpora, fieldwork notes, existing treebanks, Wikipedia, grammars,
etc.) (Zariquiey et al. 2022, Kahane et al. 2023);
➔       Projects that employ such resources to go beyond
sentence-level syntactic dependencies by developing additional layers
of annotation for studying discourse and information structure, among
other levels;
➔       Robustness and statistical validity of typological
quantitative measures on the basis of different theoretical approaches
and annotation schema (Gerdes et al. 2018, Osborne & Gerdes 2019, Yan
& Liu 2019).
➔       Limits of dependency grammar for typology: issues such as
unbalanced sampling, limitations of annotation in terms of
availability, quality, as well as ‘missing’ annotation, and
heterogeneousness of the annotation across treebanks, both in terms of
application and quality.

We envision a worthwhile exchange between more traditional typologists
and typologists who have already worked with these resources. If you
want to join us, please submit your abstract to ALT15, explicitly
indicating that it is intended for the workshop "Dependency Grammar
for Typology". Instructions on how to submit abstracts can be found on
the ALT2024 page:
Minimum Education Level: No Minimum

Description:
Large-scale multilingual corpora such as Universal Dependencies (de
Marneffe et al 2021) have enabled advances in quantitative methods in
morphosyntactic typology, allowing a transition from binary or
multivariate classifications of linguistic features to more nuanced,
continuous classifications. These enable us to capture variation
better than ever before (Levshina et al. 2023) while studying
linguistic variation from a token-based perspective (Haspelmath 2018).
Going beyond use of these resources for typological research directly,
the Universal Dependencies treebanks are used to annotate further
large-scale multilingual corpora (Kondratyuk & Straka 2019) and to
syntactically parse languages which are not covered within the
framework yet as well as for zero-shot parsing (Ammar et al. 2016;
Tran & Bisazza 2019; Üstün et al. 2022). Hence, they have become a
valuable tool for multilingual morphosyntactic analysis, the products
of which are indispensable for typology.

However, large-scale multilingual resources such as the Universal
Dependencies treebanks have also been conceived of as problematic. A
major concern for typologists has always been language sampling: this
type of resource is typically biased towards including mostly WEIRD
and especially European languages. Secondly, there is (as of yet) no
devoted program to counter this sampling bias, i.e. any coordinated
effort to include low-resource and less-described languages is on the
shoulders of individual language specialists, whose time and funds are
already under pressure. Third, as with any attempt to construct
cross-linguistically appropriate schemes for tagging and annotation,
the universal applicability of such schemes has been called into
question (Croft et al. 2017).

This workshop aims to bring together typologists working using
dependency-annotated resources for quantitative typological research.
We aim to include both new studies that peruse dependency-annotated
corpora to answer typological questions, as well as more critical
authors who point to the limitations of ‘dependency grammar for
typology’. This also includes proposals on how quantitative typology
can be conducted using heterogeneous data sources and the development
of new resources, as long as a focus on comparative research is
maintained.

Other contacts:
Erica Biagetti (erica.biagetti at unipv.it)
Luca Brigada Villa (luca.brigadavilla at unibg.it)
Andrew Dyer (andrew.dyer at uni-saarland.de)
Annemarie Verkerk (annemarie.verkerk at uni-saarland.de)

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics
                     Typology

Registration: 15-Mar-2024 to 15-Mar-2024

Contact Person: Luigi Talamo
                Email: luigi.talamo at uni-saarland.de




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