[Corpora-List] Deadline Reminder: Workshop on Computational Phonology (at RANLP 2007)

[Petya Osenova]

Submission deadline approaching: 22 June
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Workshop on
Computational Phonology
(http://www.let.rug.nl/alfa/Borovetz-2007/)

26 September 2007
Borovets, Bulgaria

In conjunction with the
6th International Conference “Recent Advances on Natural Language 
Processing”
RANLP-2007 (http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2007)
27-29 September 2007

Workshop motivation and aims

We propose a workshop on Computational Phonology to be held in
conjunction with the 6th RANLP. The focus of work on
computational phonology, which began in the 1970s is the study of
the representations and processes needed to model the sound
structure of natural languages, including e.g. the nature and
status of phonotactic constraints, the mapping from lexical to
surface structure (generation) as well as its reverse (parsing),
the form and implementation of phonology rules, the modeling of
phonological behavior, e.g. speech errors or the mappings between
textual and phonological structures (grapheme-phoneme
conversion), and phonological learning. Phonological and
computational theories collaborate naturally in approaching all
these various theoretical and practical tasks.

Some of the outstanding work in this area has been working in the
finite-state community (Koskenniemi, Kaplan & Kay, Beesley &
Karttunen), work on modeling and implementing optimality theory
(van Noord & Gerdemann, Biro), and work on learning phonology
(Johnson 1984, Gildea and Jurafsky 1996, Tesar and Smolensky
2000, Boersma and Hayes 2001, Albright and  Hayes, 2003).

In addition we encourage submissions from novel areas
such as the study of phonological variation in
dialectology and sociolinguistics, the study of
phonological interference in interlanguage production
and comprehension, and the study of sound changes in
diachronic linguistics.

The Workshop’s goals are as follows:

- bringing together researchers from various, but related backgrounds in 
computational phonology,
- organizing a discussion forum on the hot issues in a promising scientific 
area
- identifying prospects for further developments within computational 
phonology

The workshop will be on 26 September 2007. We aim at 8-10 presentations.

Invited speaker:  Grzegorz Kondrak (Alberta)

Topics of interest:

-theoretical issues which concern the computer processing of phonologically 
represented data
-standards for adequate representation of phonological data in machine 
readable way, such as ARPAbet and X-SAMPA.
-implementation of phonological knowledge, such as: phonological rules, 
interaction of phonology with morphology and/or suprasegmentals; development 
of support software tools
-exploration of phonological structure: learning methods for phonological 
rules, automatic or semi-automatic discovering of phonemic/phonetic 
dependencies in a context, feature-based analyses, acoustic measurements
-modeling of phonological behavior, e.g. speech errors, speech synthesis, 
speech recognition, text-to-speech systems
-applications of computational phonology in historical linguistics, regional 
languages and language contact

The Workshop aims at gathering researchers in phonology and computer 
science. More precisely, we would expect the active participation of more 
formally oriented phonologists, and NLPers who apply or develop methods, 
tools, etc wrt phonology. The workshop is also open to scientists who work 
at the interface between phonology and other linguistic levels.  Historical 
linguists and typologists who work computationally are welcome, too.

Important dates

Deadline for workshop abstract submission: June 22, 2007
Notification of acceptance: July 25, 2007
Final version of paper for workshop proceedings: August 31, 2007

Submissions

Papers should describe existing research connected to the topics of the 
workshop. The presentation at the workshop will be 25 minutes long (20 
minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for questions and discussion). Each 
submission should show: title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact 
author's e-mail address, postal address, telephone and fax numbers. Extended 
abstracts (maximum 8 pages, in PDF format) should conform to RANLP style 
(http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2007/).

The submissions will be received via the START system. Please follow the 
link: http://quad.softconf.com/ranlp/compphonology2007/ and the instructions 
there.

For any questions please write to Petya Osenova at the following e-mail: 
petya at bultreebank.org

The accepted papers will be published in the Workshop Proceedings. Their 
full size will be 12 pages.

Organizing committee

Petya Osenova (Department for Bulgarian Language, Sofia University)
Erhard Hinrichs (SfS, University of Tuebingen)
John Nerbonne (Alfa Informatica, University of Groningen)

Program committee:

Adam Albright (MIT),
Tamas Biro (Amsterdam),
Tomaz Erjavec (Ljubljana),
Grzegorz Kondrak (Alberta),
Vladimir Zhobov (Sofia),
Wilbert Heeringa (Groningen),
Gertjan van Noord (Groningen),
Dale Gerdemann (Tuebingen)

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