Brian Doyle: Natural Language Processing for Minority Languages -- DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS 19 MARCH

Thu Feb 6 15:50:36 UTC 2003

Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 08:54:30 -0600
Subject: FW: Call for papers: Natural Language Processing for Minority
	Languages -- DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS 19 MARCH
From: Brian Doyle <brian at gael-image.com>
To: Comhra i nGaeilge na hEireann <GAEILGE-A at LISTSERV.HEANET.IE>,
         The Celtic Linguistics List <CELTLING at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

B'fhéidir go mbeidh spéis agaibh sa mbeagán seo thíos....
(Of possible interest....)

Brian Ó Dubhghaill
Linguistics, Northeastern Illinois University (Grad student)
>
>------ Forwarded Message
>From: "McGinnis, Scott" <smcginnis at nflc.org>
>Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 09:52:28 -0500
>To: <heritage-list at Glue.umd.edu>
>Subject: Call for papers: Natural Language Processing for Minority Languages
>-- DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS 19 MARCH
>
>NLP for Minority Languages with Few Computational Linguistic Resources
>
>
>Short Title: NLP Minority Languages
>Location: Batz-sur-Mer, France
>Date: 14-Jun-2003 - 14-Jun-2003
>Call Deadline: 19-Mar-2003
>
>Web Site: http://dev.eurac.edu:8080/taln/workshop.minorities.txt
>Contact Person: Oliver Streiter
>Meeting Email: ostreiter at eurac.edu
>Linguistic Subfield(s): Computational Linguistics
>
>This is a session of the following conference:
>2003 Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles
>
>
>Meeting Description:
>
>The goal of the workshop is to get an overview of activities,
>methodologies and achievements in the area of Natural Language
>Processing of Minority Languages. Workshop on Natural Language
>Processing of Minority Languages with few computational linguistic
>resources
>
>BACKGROUND
>
>Over the last few years, minority and small languages have attracted
>considerable attention. Projects aiming at the revitalization,
>standardization and linguistic normalization have been initiated to
>promote usage of these languages and contribute to their
>survival. Speakers of smaller languages have gained awareness that
>their languages belong to the world's cultural heritage, and are
>becoming more and more inclined to use their native tongues at a
>broader scale. The rising number of web-pages in lesser-used languages
>demonstrates this fact.
>
>PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
>
>This workshop will approach the problem of minority languages from the
>computational point of view. The workshop will focus on minority
>languages with few computational linguistic resources, e.g. Occitan,
>Hakka, Corse, Nahuatl, including specific minority languages as sign
>languages. Minority languages with rich computational linguistic
>resources, as for example Catalan, are not excluded from the workshop
>as they may function as an example of a successful minority
>language. Papers related to majority languages are equally accepted in
>case the languages treated face problems similar to minority
>languages.
>
>The goal of the workshop is to get an overview of activities,
>methodologies and achievements in the area of Natural Language
>Processing of Minority Languages, in order to promote the research in
>this area and to enhance the prestige associated with this research.
>
>Automatic processing of minority languages has to overcome a number of
>difficulties which arise from their special status.
>
>* As these languages have few speakers, there are few native linguists
>and even fewer computational linguists. Rule-based approaches to
>tagging, parsing, etc. may thus be difficult to apply.
>
>* The scarce financial support that these languages enjoy equally
>seems to virtually exclude rule-based approaches due to the amount of
>human labor these approaches generally require. This problem might be
>overcome if computational frameworks derived from other languages can
>be adopted.
>
>* Corpus-based approaches are only applicable if adequate corpora are
>available. However, creation of a corpus is time- and money-consuming
>and requires linguistically sound conceptions, especially if
>general-purpose corpora are to be created.
>
>* Example-based approaches seem to be more promising in this light if
>no general-purpose corpora, but specific examples are
>required. Compilation of special examples also seems to be easier to
>implement than to write formal rules. However, little is known of the
>feasibility of this paradigm with respect to minority languages.
>
>* Shallow knowledge techniques may be developed or are already in use,
>which benefit from a specific property of a language or a language
>family. This however may hamper the transfer of the approach from one
>language to other languages. Some techniques might work with analytic
>languages and not with agglutinative languages, etc . Different
>writing systems might also prevent one simple approach from being
>applicable to another language. The workshop is expected to stimulate
>research in this area. We invite papers which are concerned with, but
>not restricted to, the following topics:.
>
>TOPICS OF INTEREST
>
>* the relation between NLP and minority language support in general,
>* development of specific NLP applications for minority languages,
>e.g. tagging, morphological analysis, parsing, information retrieval,
>machine translation
>* development of corpora and machine-readable dictionaries for minority
>languages,
>* presentation of shallow knowledge NLP techniques which could be
>applied
>to minority languages,
>* overview studies that describe the state of the art of NLP for the
>minority languages of a country, a region or a language type,
>* comparative analysis of different NLP approaches to different minority
>languages and languages types,
>* free resources for NLP, their application areas and limitations,
>* the requirements for NLP applications for special minority language
>groups.
>
>
>IMPORTANT DATES
>
>19.3.2003 Submission deadline
>31.3.2003 Notification of acceptance
>28.4.2003 Camera ready version
>
>SUBMISSION FORMAT
>
>Submissions should not be longer than 10 pages in Times 12, all
>included.  For more detailed information in French see:
>
>http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/page/taln_appel.html
>
>Style files can be downloaded here.
>
>Latex French:
>http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/doc/StyleLatexTaln03_FR
>.tgz
>Latex English:
>http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/doc/StyleLatexTaln03_EN
>.tgz
>Word French:
>http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/doc/ModeleTaln2003_FR.d
>ot
>Word English:
>http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/doc/ModeleTaln2003_EN.d
>ot
>
>CONTACT ADDRESS
>
>The contact address for submissions to the workshop and
>further informations with respect to the workshop is
>
>Oliver Streiter
>European Academy
>Language and law
>mail: ostreiter at eurac.edu
>tel:  +39 0471 055 115
>fax:  +39 0471 055 199
>
>------ End of Forwarded Message
>
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