Corpora: IRCS Workshop on Linguistic Databases

[Steven Bird]

Advance Announcement:
(apologies for duplicates)


		   IRCS WORKSHOP ON LINGUISTIC DATABASES

			University of Pennsylvania
			     Philadelphia, USA
			    11-13 December 2001

	       http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/database/


	       Sponsored by the National Science Foundation
	    and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science

			       Organized by:
	       Steven Bird, Peter Buneman and Mark Liberman
	      Department of Computer and Information Science,
       Department of Linguistics, and the Linguistic Data Consortium
			University of Pennsylvania


Linguistic databases are digital repositories of structured information
intended to document natural language and natural communicative
interaction.  Over the last decade, linguistic databases have come to stand
at the center of empirical research in the language sciences, and in the
development of new human language technologies.  Like genomic databases,
linguistic databases are complex, evolving and richly annotated
repositories, and pose interesting challenges for efficient representation,
indexing and query.  And like most scientific databases, linguistic
databases have made little use of standard database technology.

The goals of the workshop are to take stock of existing research in
linguistic databases, to identify the key problems, and to explore
applications of current database research to these problems.  More broadly,
the workshop will help define the research questions of a new "linguistic
database community" and initiate the ongoing interchange of relevant
problems and results between this community and the database community at
large.

The workshop will address a selection of the following topics:

MODELS:
* models for text databases, speech databases, multimodal databases,
  typological databases, geographical databases (language maps),
  and metadata repositories
* relational, object-oriented and semi-structured models for
  representing linguistic annotations
* representations for specific linguistic datatypes (e.g. databases of
  aligned parallel text)
* modelling temporal and (geo)spatial structure
* critical analysis of existing linguistic databases

LANGUAGES:
* query of multilayer annotations
* linguistic applications/extensions of XML query languages
* analysis of existing ad hoc query languages
* queries over temporal and (geo)spatial structure

OTHER TOPICS:
* database support (e.g. what standard database technology has proven
  worthwhile for linguistic databases?)
* appropriate indexing methods for linguistic strings and structures
* archiving and preservation
* metadata standards serving as finding aids for linguistic databases
* data provenance / data lineage
* annotation servers

Provisional Timetable

Call for papers:    posted in May
Extended abstracts: due in August
Final papers:       due in November

Website and Mailing List

Subsequent announcements will be posted to this list, and on the workshop
website: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/database/

Steven Bird, Peter Buneman and Mark Liberman

--
Steven Bird     http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb/       sb at ldc.upenn.edu
Peter Buneman   http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~peter/   peter at cis.upenn.edu
Mark Liberman   http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/      myl at unagi.cis.upenn.edu