[Corpora-List] First CFP: Workshop on Computational Phonology, RANLP

[Petya Osenova]

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 15, 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 
(http://www.softconf.com/). More details about the procedure will be 
provided soon on the site of the workshop.

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

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

Program committee:

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

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