Corpora: CFP: Morphology/ Phonology learning

[Mike Maxwell]

I'm attaching a Call for Papers for a workshop on Morphology/ Phonology
learning, which I hope will be of interest to readers of this list.

     Mike Maxwell
     Linguistic Data Consortium
     maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu

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                      Call for Papers

Workshop on Morphological and Phonological Learning
                    Philadelphia, PA
                      12 July 2002

                    Sixth Meeting of the
  ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology
                    in cooperation with
  ACL Special Interest Group in Natural Language Learning



Motivation
----------

Two groups of researchers are converging on the need to
construct morphologies and phonologies of low density
languages.

Natural language engineers hope to develop machine
translation, speech recognition, and other NLP technologies
for these languages.  Meanwhile, linguists and native
speakers want to document the languages for scientific or
humanitarian reasons. (This need is often expressed
concerning endangered languages, but is not restricted to
that situation.)

This convergence of interests makes it an opportune time to
meet to discuss ways to analyze the morphology and phonology
of a language (or a group of related languages) more quickly
(and perhaps more accurately) than traditional methods have
allowed.

Techniques for morphology and phonology learning may vary
in the amount of human involvement they require.  At one end
of the spectrum are tools intended to help a native speaker
(perhaps with the aid of a linguist) describe his or her own
language.  At the other end are tools for unsupervised
machine learning from texts.  Intermediate or hybrid
approaches are also possible.

Methodologies to be discussed in this workshop need not be
fully general: for example, a tool might be best suited to
agglutinating, fusional, or polysynthetic languages, or
specialized for compounding or reduplication.

The Workshop on Morphological and Phonological Learning
will be held July 12 2002, immediately after the ACL-02
meetings at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Pennsylvania, USA.

The workshop web site, with further information, is
http://morph.ldc.upenn.edu/maxwell/MorphologyLearning.html.
More information about SIGPHON is available at
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/sigphon, and about SIGNLL at
http://ilk.kub.nl/~signll/. The ACL-2002 website is
http://www.acl2002.org.



Topics
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* Tools to help a native speaker or linguist visualize and
  describe the morphology and/or phonology of a language

* Tools for (semi-)automated discovery of morphology and/or
  phonology

* Databases and annotation tools designed for morphological
  or phonological information, particularly as these relate
  to learning

* Resources for learning (taggers, seed grammars and
  lexicons, partially annotated text, bilingual text, etc.)

* Linguistic (knowledge-based) approaches vs. empirical
  approaches; hybrid methodologies

* Evaluation/comparison of morphology learning technologies

* Adapting and reusing grammars and lexicons among related
  languages

* Application of learned morphologies and phonologies
  (proofreading, machine translation, linguistic research,
  documentation of endangered languages, speech recognition)

* Theoretical results on learnability or representation



Program Committee
-----------------

* Mike Maxwell (Linguistic Data Consortium, chair)

* Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, SIGNLL)

* Jason Eisner (Johns Hopkins University)

* Steven Bird (University of Pennsylvania)

* Lauri Karttunen (Parc Inc.)

* John A. Goldsmith (University of Chicago)

Invited Speaker: David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins University




Schedule
--------

* Submission Deadline: 5 April 2002

* Notification: 25 April 2002

* Camera-ready Copy Due: 21 May 2002

* Workshop: 12 July 2002