Corpora: 5th TELRI Seminar - First Call for Papers

[Milena Slavcheva]

First Call for Papers
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5th TELRI Seminar
Corpus Lingustics: How to Extract Meaning from Corpora
22-24 September 2000
Ljubljana, Slovenia

The fifth in the series of TELRI (Trans-European Language Resources
Infrastructure) seminars will be held on 22-24 September 2000 in Ljubljana,
Slovenia with the theme "Corpus Linguistics: How to Extract Meaning from
Corpora".

Theme

The universe of discourse, i.e. the ensemble of all communication acts of a
discourse community, functions as an autonomous semantic system. This does
not contest that texts may also refer to some discourse-external reality.
But first and foremost texts, text segments and text elements refer to
previous occurrences: they address, paraphrase and rearrange segments and
elements that have been used before, in the same text or in other texts.
Corpus linguistics detects and analyzes the recurrence of meaningful
conglomerates in the discourse, combining statistical and categorial
approaches, and resulting in the structured presentation of the evidence.
This evidence represents the shareable meaning of text segments and text
elements. The paraphrases we find in the discourse tell us how to
understand them, usage, i.e. information on how segments and elements are
embedded in their contexts, tells us how to produce texts in which they are
being used. Corpus linguistics is about extracting meaning from
(monolingual, comparable or parallel) corpora. Corpus linguistics generates
the semantic knowledge which is the basis of language practice as in
information extraction, translation or foreign language document authoring.
Corpus linguistics is the prime approach to Human Language Technology, if
we understand HLT as the technology for dealing with general unrestricted
language as opposed to controlled languages as formal calculi.

The TELRI Seminar will feature contributions focussing on all aspects of
extracting meaning from corpora.

Invited Speakers

To be announced.

Young Researchers Workshop

A pre-seminar workshop on Thursday, September 21 is dedicated to
presentations of work in progress by young researchers, i.e. graduate
students and young research fellows. Seminar fees will be waived for young
researchers presenting at the Seminar. TELRI will investigate further
possibilities for financial support.

Software Demonstrations

A goal of the seminar is to stimulate cooperation between industry and
academia in the West and in Central and Eastern Europe. The programme will
include sessions devoted to demonstrating commercial and public domain
software with emphasis on information extraction systems. Seminar fees will
be waived for software presenters.

Papers

Papers and presentations should be 30 minutes long including discussion. A
selection will be published after the seminar. Fees will be waived for
accepted speakers.

Submission Guidelines

Authors are requested to submit abstracts which should not exceed 600
words. The address for electronic submission is: telri-admin at ids-mannheim.de

Fees

Academic participants:   EUR 50/20*
Industrial participants: EUR 100/30*
Students: 		    EUR 20/10*

* refers to fees for participants from CEE/NIS

Schedule

Abstract Submission Due:     5 June 2000
Notification of Acceptance: 10 July 2000

Venue

This year's TELRI seminar will take place in Ljubljana, the capital of
Slovenia, a medieval town at the crossroads of Mediterranean and
Central-European cultures. The venue of the seminar will be the Faculty
of Arts, located near the historical centre of the town and within
walking distance to most hotels. The Faculty itself has recently been
extended with an annexe, which provides new, well-equipped and airy
classrooms for the seminar sessions as well as a cafeteria for the
coffee breaks. OHP and beamer will be available in the presentation
rooms, Internet access will be provided in the computer lab in the main
building. Travel and accomodation details to be given later.

Further Information

Further information can be obtained from
http://www.telri.de
http://nl.ijs.si/telri00/
telri-admin at ids-mannheim.de