8.323, Calls: Varieties of English, NLP
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LINGUIST List: Vol-8-323. Wed Mar 5 1997. ISSN: 1068-4875.
Subject: 8.323, Calls: Varieties of English, NLP
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=================================Directory=================================
1)
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 1997 10:04:43 +0200
From: Hans.Lindquist at hum.hv.se (Hans Lindquist)
Subject: varieties of English, MAVEN
2)
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 1997 11:34:19 -0700 (MST)
From: Remi Zajac <rzajac at crl.nmsu.edu>
Subject: IJCAI-97 Workshop on Ontologies and Multilingual NLP
-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 1997 10:04:43 +0200
From: Hans.Lindquist at hum.hv.se (Hans Lindquist)
Subject: varieties of English, MAVEN
Call for papers
March 1997
The major varieties of English (MAVEN)
British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand
An international conference at Vaxjo University College
20-22 November 1997
English is used by a constantly growing number of people all over the
world, and several varieties, different Englishes, have been
identified. However, only a limited number of regional varieties of
English serve as models for learners in other parts of the world. The
most important of these are usually considered to be the British,
American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand varieties.
The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars who are
studying the development of these varieties, and in particular their
interrelationships. The question of how, and to what extent, British
and American English differ is an ever intriguing one for European
learners. How strong is the influence of American vocabulary, grammar
and pronunciation on British English? Is there also a current going
the other way? Where does Canadian English stand in relation to
British and American? And what about the influences from Britain and
America on the Englishes of Australia and New Zealand?
The answers to questions such as these have an obvious bearing on
language pedagogy as well as lexicography and language description in
general, but also on research areas like language change and
sociolinguistics.
Papers are invited on all aspects of these major varieties of English
=AD pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics. Reports on
empirical investigations (studies based on electronic corpora,
elicitation tests, text analysis, observation etc.) are particularly
welcome.
Scientific programme
Keynote lecture: Jan Svartvik, Lund, Sweden
Plenary lectures (so far): Janet Holmes, Wellington, New Zealand
Christian Mair, Freiburg, Germany
Peter Trudgill, Lausanne, Switzerland
The organization of paper presentations will depend on the number of
participants.
Publication
We plan to publish the conference proceedings.
Social programme
There will be a conference dinner in the campus castle (must be seen
to be believed) and a herring party at (inside) a glassworks.
Accommodation
Accommodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. There are
frequent local buses between the town centre and the campus.
Organizing committee
Hans Lindquist, Hans.Lindquist at hum.hv.se
Staffan Klintborg, Staffan.Klintborg at hum.hv.se
Magnus Levin, Magnus.Levin at hum.hv.se (conference secretary)
About Vaxjo University College Vaxjo University College is a growing
establishment with over 7,500 students and is expected to be given the
right to call itself a university before the year 2000. The English
section of the Department of the Humanities is growing fast and will
appoint its first full professor in 1997. The research project
GramTime started in July, 1996, funded by the Bank of Sweden
Tercentenary Foundation, and has the the aim of studying trends in
modern English grammar with the help of computer corpora (the BNC,
CobuildDirect and others). For further information, check out our home
page at <http://www.hv.se/hum/html>. The department is in a new
Humanities building on a campus situated in beautiful surroundings 3
kilometres from the city centre.
About the city of Vaxjo
The cathedral city of Vaxjo was founded in the 12th century and now
has 72,000 inhabitants. It is pleasantly situated among forests and
lakes in the south of Sweden, 200 kms north of Malmo, 250 kms
south-east of Gothenburg and 400 kms south of Stockholm. It is an
administrative and educational centre but also has some important
technical industry and is right in the middle of "The Kingdom of
Crystal" with famous glassworks like Kosta, Boda and Orrefors, to
mention just a few.
The province of Smaland is also well-known for being one of the
principal areas from which large numbers of poor Swedes emigrated to
America in the 19th century, and the Emigrant Institute, a museum and
research centre, is well worth a visit.
Vaxjo can easily be reached by daily SAS flights from Stockholm or
from Copenhagen in Denmark. There are also direct train connections from
Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo/Copenhagen.
Submission of papers
Send in your abstract (approximately 250 words in Word, WordPerfect,
RTF or ascii format) by 15 June as an attachment to an e-mail message
to: Staffan.Klintborg at hum.hv.se. In addition, include the abstract in
the body of the e-mail message. If you do not have access to e-mail,
send in four copies of the abstract on paper to: Staffan Klintborg,
Department of the Humanities, Vaxjo University College, SE-351 95
VAXJO, Sweden
Deadlines
Preliminary registration (to get on our mailing-list)
as soon as possible
Second circular with details about housing, travel, costs
mid-April 1997
Early registration at reduced rate
by 15 May 1997
Submission of abstracts
by 15 June 1997
Acceptance notification to authors
by 1 August 1997
Registration at normal rate
by 15 September 1997
Further information
Contact Magnus.Levin at hum.hv.se
For the organizing committee
Hans Lindquist, Ph.D.
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
MAVEN Vaxjo 20-22 November
Preliminary registration form
To receive the next circular, send in this form (by e-mail or ordinary
mail) to: Magnus Levin, Department of the Humanities, Vaxjo University
College, SE-351 95 VAXJO, Sweden; e-mail: Magnus.Levin at hum.hv.se.
Name:
Affiliation:
Mailing address:
E-mail:
Phone:
=46ax:
I would like to / would not like to present a paper.
Title of paper, if any:
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Universitetslektor Hans Lindquist Hans Lindquist, Ph.D.
Engelska English Section
Institutionen f=F6r humaniora Department of the Humanitie=
s
H=F6gskolan i V=E4xj=F6 Vaxjo University Colleg=
e
351 95 V=C4XJ=D6 S-351 95 VAXJO, Sweden
Tel 0470-70 85 70 Phone +46 470 70 85 70
=46ax 0470-75 18 88 Fax +46 470 75 18 88
E-post/E-mail Hans.Lindquist at hum.hv.se
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-------------------------------- Message 2 -------------------------------
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 1997 11:34:19 -0700 (MST)
From: Remi Zajac <rzajac at crl.nmsu.edu>
Subject: IJCAI-97 Workshop on Ontologies and Multilingual NLP
**********************************************************************
Call for Submissions Please Distribute Widely
**********************************************************************
IJCAI-97 Workshop on
Ontologies and Multilingual NLP
Nagoya, Japan, August 23-25, 1997
(Web page: <a ref="http://crl.nmsu.edu/Events/IJCAI/">
Workshop on Ontologies and Multilingual NLP</a>)
Background
==========
A number of ontology-related workshops have been held in the past
years (e.g., 1993 in Padua, 1995 IJCAI, 1996 ECAI, 1997 AAAI Spring
Symposium, etc.). However, none of them concentrated centrally on
applications of world modeling to multilingual Natural Language
Processing (NLP).
Ontologies for knowledge-based computing and especially for Natural
Language Processing are steadily reaching a level of sophistication
and size which make them increasingly useful to the resolution of
problems in real-world NLP applications. The recent creation of an ad
hoc ANSI working group on standardization of ontologies is an
indication of the maturity of the field. More and more ontology-based
systems are being built for multilingual applications (e.g.,
multilingual machine translation, multilingual information
retrieval). However, most of the language-processing oriented
ontologies that have been built so far have English or another
language (e.g., Japanese or Spanish) as the basis (e.g., WordNet, EDR,
Pangloss, etc.). Since there is a growing need for multilingual
applications of these ontologies, it is natural to ask the following
questions: Are any of these ontologies actually used in a multilingual
setting? Can we characterize the degree of independence of an ontology
from the natural language it is based on? What are the necessary
properties of a truly multilingual (or universal) ontology? Is it
possible to obtain a language-neutral ontology from a
language-dependent ontology? What applications truly need multilingual
(or language-neutral) ontologies? How do we separate language-specific
(or lexical) information from ontological knowledge? How can the
depth of knowledge in the ontology be balanced with the needs of an
application? What are the prospects of automating ontology
acquisition? What is the relationship between an ontology as the
repository of general knowledge about the world and knowledge about
particular individuals - people, places, organizations, events,
etc.?
These and many more questions must be discussed much more widely than
they have been till now. Many of the previous workshops were devoted
to more formal issues in ontology building, such as the knowledge
representation schemata, closures, formal properties of ontologies,
and so on. Moreover, they included the discussion of small ontologies
that cover a very narrow domain of problem solving; NLP typically
requires a broad-coverage ontology. The hypothesis of using
interlingual representations based on an ontology is at least 50 years
old. It was originally formulated in the framework of machine
translation. However, few systems to date have tested this hypothesis,
for MT or other applications, by implementing a large-scale
interlingua-based system using a language-independent ontology. This
workshop will debate the benefits, costs and competitiveness of such
an approach to solving semantic and cross-language problems for MT,
IR, and other NLP applications.
Audience
========
The workshop is open to all members of the AI and NLP community. The
workshop is intended for researchers and practitioners in
knowledge-based NLP, artificial intelligence and computational
linguistics who have been working on large scale knowledge-based
resources, ontologies, multilingual lexical semantics, interlinguas,
and their applications. Reports of actual work including problems and
solutions in the design, construction and use of ontologies are
strongly encouraged but more theoretical work (grounded on actual work
on ontologies) aimed at defining the limits, constraints and
directions for large-scale practical language-neutral ontologies is
welcome as well.
Issues
======
Issues to be addressed include but are not limited to:
- Design of language-neutral ontologies.
- Acquisition problems in multilingual ontologies.
- Multilingual applications of ontologies.
- Multilingual ontologies and terminological knowledge bases.
- Ontologies and interlinguas.
- Standardization of ontologies: issues of multilinguality.
- Ontologies and Lexicons.
- Sharing and standardization of language-independent ontologies for NLP.
- Costs and competitiveness of ontology-based solutions vis-a-vis
corpus-based and transfer-based methods for multilingual NLP.
Format of the Workshop
======================
The workshop will include twelve presentation periods which will be
divided into ten-minute presentations of positions followed by
20-minute discussions.
The attendance will be limited to 20 active participants. Papers will
be circulated among participants several weeks before the
workshop. Presentation will be short, under 15 minutes (10 minutes
preferably) with 20 minutes reserved for exchanges.
We encourage the authors to focus on the salient points of their
presentation and identify possible controversial positions. We
encourage authors not to repeat as is what has been already written in
the paper. There will be ample time set aside for informal and panel
discussions and audience participation.
Please note that workshop participants are required to register at
the main IJCAI-97 conference.
Submission Information
======================
Timetable
- -------
- March 15, 1997: Deadline for reception of submissions.
- May 1, 1997: Notification of acceptance.
- July 1, 1997: Deadline for reception of camera-ready copy.
Format
- ----
Submissions must not exceed 6 pages in camera-ready
format. Submissions in electronic form are prefered. Authors should
follow the IJCAI format. <http://www.ijcai.org/ijcai-97/CfX/cfp.html>
Review Process
- ------------
Papers will be subject to peer review. Selection criteria include
accuracy and originality of ideas, clarity and significance of results
and the quality of the presentation.
The decision of the Program Committee, taking into consideration the
individual reviews, will be final and cannot be appealed. Papers
selected will be scheduled for presentation. Authors of accepted
papers, or their representatives, are expected to present their papers
at the conference.
Submission
- --------
Electronic submission should be sent at zajac at crl.nmsu.edu. The
subject line should contain "IJCAI97 workshop submission". Papers
should be sent at the following address:
Rimi Zajac / IJCAI-97
Computing Research Laboratory
New-Mexico State University
PO Box 30001 / 3CRL
Las Cruces NM 88003
USA
Fax: +1-505-646-6218
Schedule
========
- March 15, 1997: Deadline for reception of submissions.
- May 1, 1997: Notification of acceptance.
- July 1, 1997: Deadline for reception of camera-ready copy.
- July 21, 1997: Publication of final list of workshop participants.
- August 23-25, 1997: IJCAI-97 Workshop.
Organizing Committee
====================
Rimi Zajac, CRL, New-Mexico State University, USA (Chair): zajac at crl.nmsu.edu
Lynn Carlson, US Department of Defense: lmcarls at afterlife.ncsc.mil
Kavi Mahesh, CRL, New-Mexico State University, USA: mahesh at crl.nmsu.edu
Kazunori Muraki, NEC, Japan: k-muraki at hum.cl.nec.co.jp
Nicholas Ostler, Linguacubun, Ltd., UK: nostler at chibcha.demon.co.uk
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