[Corpora-List] Workshop CFP: Comp. Approaches to dialectal and typol. variation

[Verena Henrich]

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Computational approaches to the study of dialectal and typological variation

Workshop organized as part of the European Summer School on Logic, 
Language and Information ESSLLI 2012 (http://www.esslli2012.pl), August 
6-10 2012 (ESSLLI first week), Opole, Poland

Workshop Organizers: Erhard Hinrichs (erhard.hinrichs at uni-tuebingen.de), 
Gerhard Jäger (gerhard.jaeger at uni-tuebingen.de)

Workshop Purpose:

Computational dialectometry is an innovative method to investigate 
language variation. This still rather young approach employs techniques 
from statistical NLP - such as pattern recognition, sequence alignment, 
clustering, and dimension reduction techniques - to study synchronous 
dialectal variation. It uses easy-to-operationalize data (such as 
phonetic transcriptions of a small core vocabulary) collected from a 
large number of speakers within a certain geographic area. Methods from 
unsupervised machine learning are then used to measure dialect distances 
and to model dialect continua. Together with advances in digitally 
collecting population and geographic data, it is now possible to study 
the correlation of linguistic variation with social and geographic factors.

Recent years have seen remarkable efforts in typology to set up 
electronic data inventories that contain significant data sets from 
large, typologically diverse and representative samples of languages. 
The data types thus collected in computational typology are remarkably 
similar - from an operational point of view - to the kind of resources 
that are being used in computational dialectometry. It is therefore a 
natural move to bring these two communities into contact and to discuss 
the mutual usability of algorithms and perhaps common standards for data 
encoding and exchange.

The goals of this workshop are twofold:
- to expose the ESSLLI community in general and researchers at the 
interface of language and computation in particular to the application 
of data-driven NLP methods to a rather new domain, and
- to provide a forum for practitioners and students of computational 
dialectometry, of quantitative typology, and of historical linguistics 
to learn about each other's research concerns and accompanying methods, 
and to receive feedback as well as inspiration for possible 
collaboration across sub-disciplines.

Submission Details

Authors are invited to submit an EXTENDED ABSTRACT for a 30-minute 
presentation (including discussion). Submissions should not exceed 3 
pages, including figures, data, and references. Details about the 
anonymous electronic submission procedure will be posted with the second 
Call for Papers. The submissions will be reviewed anonymously by the 
workshop's programme committee. The abstracts accepted for presentation 
will appear in the workshop web site and be published as part of the 
ESSLLI 2012 proceedings. In addition, we are considering the possibility 
of compiling a journal special issue from selected papers presented at 
the workshop.

Program Committee: TBA

Local Arrangements:

All workshop participants, including the authors, are required to 
register for ESSLLI.

Important Dates:

- December 20: Second Call for Papers
- January 15: Final Call for Papers
- February 15: *Deadline* for Submission
- April 15: Notification of Acceptance
- June 1: Deadline for Proceedings Papers
- August 6-10: Workshop


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