CFP Uncovering Language History from Multilingual Resources

Wed Dec 7 08:52:52 UTC 2011

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		       CALL FOR PAPERS

	EACL 2012 Joint Workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH
           Visualization of Linguistic Patterns
  		          and
  Uncovering Language History from Multilingual Resources
	 https://sites.google.com/site/lingvisunclh/

	    April 23-24, 2012, Avignon, France

	   Submission deadline: January 30, 2012

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The overall aim of the workshop is to explore how methods developed in
computational linguistics, statistics and computer science can help
linguists in exploring various language phenomena. The workshop focuses
particularly on two special subtopics: 
1) visualization of linguistic patterns (LINGVIS); 
2) usage of multilingual resources in computational historical
linguistics (UNCLH).

Visualization of Linguistic Patterns
------------------------------------

The aim of the first subtopic of this joint workshop is to combine
techniques developed in the vibrant fields of Information Visualization
(InfoVis) and Visual Analytics with methodology and analyses from
theoretical and computational linguistics in order to allow for a novel
perspective on linguistic data and patterns. We aim to bring together
researchers interested in combining methods and insights from the fields
of Visual Analytics and Linguistics: despite the fact that statistical
methods for language analysis have proliferated in the last two decades,
computational linguistics has so far only marginally availed itself of
techniques from InfoVis and Visual Analytics (e.g., Collins et al. 2009,
Collins 2010, Honkela et al. 1995, Mayer et al. 2010a,b, Rohrdantz et
al. 2011, Neumann et al. 2007). Besides standard visualization
techniques such as bar charts, scatterplots or line charts, a large
number of advanced novel methods have been developed within these
fields. Prominent examples are treemaps, showing hierarchical data,
pixel displays, or the sophisticated visualizations of graphs that are
an intuitive and beneficial way of modeling interactions. The workshop
aims to investigate how complex linguistic questions can profit from
such visual analysis.

We especially encourage submission on the following topics: 

* using visual analysis to probe change in language over time (historical
linguistics) and differences in structure across languages (typology) 

* experimenting with methods for the exploration of high dimensional
spaces like vector spaces for analyses of, for example, lexical semantic
or thematic information 

* exploring of linguistic patterns in terms of integrating geo-spatial
locations with hierarchical data structures and temporal dimensions 

* designing multifactorial visual analyses of the interacting linguistic
factors

Uncovering Language History from Multilingual Resources
-------------------------------------------------------

The second subtopic of the joint workshop focuses on the usage of
multilingual resources in computational historical linguistics. In the
past 20 years, the application of quantitative methods in historical
linguistics has received increasing attention among linguists (e.g., Dunn
et al. 2005, Heggarty et al. 2010, McMahon and McMahon 2006),
computational linguists (e.g., Kondrak 2001, Hall and Klein 2010), and
evolutionary anthropologists (e.g., Gray and Atkinson 2003). Due to the
application of these quantitative methods, the field of historical
linguistics is undergoing a renaissance. One of the main problems that
researchers face is the limited amount of suitable data, often falling
back on relatively restricted 'Swadesh type' wordlists. One solution is
to use synchronic data, like dictionaries or texts, which are available
for many languages. For example, in Kondrak (2001), vocabularies of four
Algonquian languages were used in the task of automatic cognate
identification. Another solution employed by Snyder et al. (2010) is to
apply a non-parametric Bayesian framework to two non-parallel texts in
the task of text deciphering. Although very promising, these approaches
have so far only received modest attention. Thus, many questions and
challenges in the automatization of language resources in computational
historical linguistics remain open and ripe for investigation.

We especially encourage submissions related to the following topics: 

* computational approaches that uncover sound correspondences and sound
change 

* automatic identification of cognates and/or loanwords across
languages 

* linguistically-informed n-gram comparisons, e.g. using flexible n-gram
length or using more advanced sound similarities between languages 

* comparison of Wordnet structures from different languages

* treatment of dictionaries as translation graphs and comparison of graph
structures between dictionaries

* exploration of meaning shifts as instantiated through differences in
usage in texts

================
Invited Speakers
================

Christopher Collins (University of Ontario Institute of Technology)
Grzegorz Kondrak (University of Alberta) 

===============
Important Dates
===============

Deadline for submission: January 30, 2012 
Notification of acceptance: February 24, 2012 
Revised version of papers: March 9, 2012 
Workshop: April 23-24, 2012

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Organizing Committee
====================

LINGVIS: 
Miriam Butt (Universität Konstanz)
Sheelagh Carpendale (University of Calgary)
Gerald Penn (University of Toronto)

UNCLH: 
Jelena Prokic (LMU Munich) 
Michael Cysouw (LMU Munich) 
Thomas Mayer (LMU Munich) 
Steven Moran (LMU Munich)

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Program Committee
=================

Quentin Atkinson (University of Auckland)
Christopher Collins (University of Ontario)
Chris Culy (University of Tübingen)
Dan Dediu (MPI Nijmegen) 
Michael Dunn (MPI Nijmegen) 
Sheila Embleton (York University, Toronto) 
Simon Greenhill (University of Auckland) 
Harald Hammarström (University of Nijmegen) 
Wilbert Heeringa (Meertens Institute, Amsterdam) 
Gerhard Heyer (University of Leipzig) 
Paul Heggarty (EVA MPI, Leipzig) 
Eric Holman (UCLA) 
Gerhard Jäger (University of Tübingen) 
Daniel Keim (University of Konstanz) 
Tibor Kiss (University of Bochum) 
Jonas Kuhn (University of Stuttgart) 
John Nerbonne (University of Groningen) 
Anke Lüdeling (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Don Ringe (University of Pennsylvania) 
Hinrich Schütze (University of Stuttgart) 
Tandy Warnow (University of Texas at Austin) 
Søren Wichmann (EVA MPI, Leipzig)

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Contact 
=======

LINGVIS: Annette Hautli (annette.hautli at uni-konstanz.de) 
UNCLH: Jelena Prokic (unclh2012 at gmail.com)

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Submission Instructions
=======================

All submissions must be submitted electronically as PDF via the EACL
submission system:

https://softconf.com/eacl2012/LINGVIS-UNCLH/

All papers must follow the two-column format of EACL proceedings.
Authors are strongly recommended to use the style files available on the
conference web site:

http://eacl2012.org/information-for-authors/index.html

Papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content and any number of
additional pages containing references only. We invite different
submission modalities: 
(i) regular long papers (8 content pages + 1 page for references); 
(ii) short papers (4 content pages + 1 page for references). 
In addition, authors can specify whether they also want to be considered
for poster presentations.

As the reviewing will be blind, papers must not include the authors'
names and affiliations.