[Corpora-List] Conf: Co-occurrence: from a statistical to a textual phenomenon

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Conference call
Co-occurrence: from a statistical to a textual phenomenon
Besançon, 8-9-10 February 2012

Call for papers

60 years ago, Firth declared, “you shall judge a word by the company it keeps.”
Since he made that historic statement, studies on co-occurrence patterns have
multiplied in the world and have now become a field in their own right, existing
within the larger fields of corpus linguistics and text linguistics.

Work focusing on co-occurrence patterns has adopted a great variety of
perspectives, focusing on, for example, phraseological phenomena, automatic
extraction of idioms, automatic translation, homograph disambiguation, text
mining, textual description and modelling, and retrieval of discourse themes.
Also, the terminology used has displayed a notable diversity (which may not be
entirely explained by translation effects): indeed, the phenomena examined have
been referred to as co-occurrence patterns, collocations, colligations,
correlates, associations, and other terms. However, one should not be puzzled,
because, in spite of these visible differences, studies on co-occurrence
patterns all share a common postulate regarding the essential role of context in
the elaboration of word meaning, and they all bring a probabilistic approach to
the study of language [see London school (Firth and Halliday), Birmingham school
(Sinclair), Laboratoire Saint-Cloud (Tournier), etc]. In brief, they assume that
(i) meaning is always a contextual phenomenon and is elaborated on the basis of
the co-text; and (ii) co-occurrence patterns are to be considered as the only
objectified units of the context, a minimal yet calculable form.

The colloquium “Co-occurrence: from a statistical to a textual phenomenon”, to
be held in Besançon from 8-10 February 2012, intends to take stock of current
studies, to compare methodologies, and to analyse the scientific stakes
involved.

Lexicological and phraseological studies, as well as work on natural language
processing, may be submitted. Contributions may also present new logarithms, or
new tools for extracting and modelling co-occurrence phenomena. Work that would
embrace the path opened long ago by Halliday and Hasan, i.e. to consider
textuality as being primarily built by co-occurrence facts, would be most
appreciated.

Whether the contributions rely on the simple computation of word pairs that
statistically co-occur within a given corpus, or on the simple identification of
words that are statistically associated with a word-pole, it is expected that
they will shed light on more complex structures such as the intricate
co-occurrence networks organizing a text, generalised co-occurrences (Viprey),
or polyco-occurrences (Martinez), which contribute to the establishment of
underlying  equivalence or resonance structures. Contributions may also address
indirect co-occurrence patterns A => B => C (also called second-generation
co-occurrence patterns) which, if repeated several times, help reveal the
content of a text. Indeed, since a text is now widely considered as a reticular
entity formed by recurrent patterns, echoes, and rhizomes, then co-occurrence
patterns should make text description and modelling possible.

The issues of the syntagmatic axis and the linear orientation of a text may also
be debated. Co-occurrence patterns have been defined, first, as a purely
statistical phenomenon, i.e. as the regular co-presence of two linguistic units
within a given textual window; but it may be improved by identifying
distributional constraints (following the tradition of Harris’s work) or
constraints affecting adjacency relations, or the orientation, position and/or
sequencing of given units; work of this kind would then meet the notions of
pattern, repeated segments (Salem) or motifs (Longrée and Mellet).

Finally, special attention may also be given to multi-level co-occurrence
patterns i.e. patterns connecting two grammatical units (and not two lexical
items as is usually the case when one analyses the vocabulary of a given
corpus); studies may also cross linguistic levels and focus on the co-occurrence
of lexical units with grammatical units, lemmas with morpho-syntactic tags, etc.

A certain number of submissions concerned with the history of the notion of
co-occurrence and its role in the emergence and evolution of textual linguistics
will be accepted; the tradition may be investigated in French-speaking
countries, in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian areas, or in the rest of the
world.

With the exception of this last (historical) orientation, submissions must rely
on precisely defined corpora, and, beyond the processing and analysis of the
data, they must emphasize the methodological and/or theoretical contribution to
the field.

The languages of the conference are French and English.

Key words
Co-occurrences
Repeated segments
Collocations
Lexical associations
Semantic contextualization
Corpus linguistics
Textuality

Scientific committee
Gaëtane Dostie, Serge Heiden, Margareta Kastberg, Jean-Marc Leblanc, Dominique
Legallois, Dominique Longrée, Lita Lundqvist, Damon Mayaffre, Sylvie Mellet,
Henning Nølke, Max Silberstein, Jean Véronis, Jean-Marie Viprey.

Calendar
Conference: 8-9-10 February 2012
Deadline for paper submission: 10 September 2011
Notification of acceptance: 15 October 2011

Submission
Abstracts should be submitted at the following addresses: sylvie.mellet at unice.fr
and jmviprey at gmail.com
Abstracts should be 2 pages in length (references not included) written in
French or English.
Abstracts will be refereed anonymously by an international selection committee.

Conference proceedings will be published, after a new process of submission,
review and selection, in Corpus (11) to appear in November 2012.


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