17.3548, Calls: Applied Ling, Computational Ling/UK; Computational Ling/USA

Fri Dec 1 17:40:29 UTC 2006

LINGUIST List: Vol-17-3548. Fri Dec 01 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.3548, Calls: Applied Ling,   Computational Ling/UK;  Computational Ling/USA

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1)
Date: 01-Dec-2006
From: Heather Hewitt < BAAL07 at education.ed.ac.uk >
Subject: 40th BAAL Annual Meeting 

2)
Date: 30-Nov-2006
From: Karine Megerdoomian < karine at mitre.org >
Subject: Computational Approaches to Arabic Script Languages 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 12:38:35
From: Heather Hewitt < BAAL07 at education.ed.ac.uk >
Subject: 40th BAAL Annual Meeting 

Full Title: 40th BAAL  Annual Meeting 

Date: 06-Sep-2007 - 08-Sep-2007
Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Heather Hewitt
Meeting Email: BAAL07 at education.ed.ac.uk
Web Site: http://www.baal.org.uk/conf2007/index.htm 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-Mar-2007 

Meeting Description:

40th British Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Meeting

Theme: 'Technology, Ideology and Practice in Applied Linguistics'
Plenary speakers:
Karin Aijmer, University of Gothenburg
Norman Fairclough, University of Lancaster
Richard Johnstone, University of Stirling

6-8 September 2007, University of Edinburgh

Conference Organisers:  
Alan Davies, Linguistics and English Language
e-mail:  a1adavie at staffmail.ed.ac.uk
Heather Hewitt, Institute for Applied Language Studies
e-mail:  BAAL07 at education.ed.ac.uk

The 40th BAAL annual conference will be jointly hosted by three departments of the University of Edinburgh: Linguistics and English Language, the Institute for Applied Language Studies and The Moray House School of Education. The conference will be held in the Central Area Campus of the university, which is within 10 minutes' walking distance of the city-centre. A highlight of the event will be the celebration of 50 years of applied linguistics at the university. This will be marked by the invited Pit Corder Colloquium and a dinner in Old College. 

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and a thriving, cosmopolitan, cultural and educational centre. In the month before the conference the city's international arts festivals will be taking place and, during the same period, several other international linguistics conferences will be held in universities only a short distance away. 

Edinburgh is well served by regular and low-cost flights from cities across Britain and Europe, by direct flights from North America, by sea from Europe and by high-speed rail links from around the UK. 

Abstracts are welcome in any area of Applied Linguistics that fits within the theme of the conference: ''Technology, Ideology and Practice in Applied Linguistics''.

Deadline for receipt of Abstracts: 31 March 2007 

Please send one electronic copy to BAAL07 at education.ed.ac.uk in an email entitled ''BAAL07_oneinitialsurname'', e.g. ''BAAL06_fbrown'',  in an attachment also entitled ''BAAL07_oneinitialsurname'' 

If you prefer to submit your abstract by post, please send four copies to:
Heather Hewitt, Institute for Applied Language Studies, 21 Hill Place, Edinburgh
EH8 9DP.

Label and format both electronic and paper abstracts as follows:
- Title in bold on all copies
- Name, affiliation, address, tel. and email on the electronic copy and on one of the paper copies
- Text 300 words maximum (including the title and references)
- Single-spaced
- Justified
- Times New Roman 12 

Indicate the type of abstract that you are submitting:
- 20-minute paper for the parallel sessions
- 20 minute paper for one of the Special Interest Group (SIG) tracks which is running 
- proposed colloquium 
- poster

Indicate whether you want a scholarship :
- BAAL offers ten UK student scholarships. These are worth £150, which covers registration and accommodation, but not meals and travel. 
- BAAL offers two International scholarships, one of which is The Chris Brumfit International Scholarship. These are worth £1,000, which goes towards registration, accommodation, meals and travel. 

Note:
- Individual papers have 35 minutes: 20 for the presentation, 15 for questions. 
- SIG tracks and Colloquia have 160 minutes (half day) a minimum of four papers. 
- Colloquia proposers should plan their half day in four slots, in step with the individual paper slots. If they wish to have a larger number of papers, they may fit two papers into what would normally be a single slot. Colloquia papers should cohere. The order of the papers should not be changed after acceptance.
- All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously
- Each individual paper, colloquium and poster is rated by three reviewers: one Executive Committee and two Local Organising Committee members
- SIG track papers are also rated by three reviewers: two from the SIG and one Executive Committee member

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 12:38:40
From: Karine Megerdoomian < karine at mitre.org >
Subject: Computational Approaches to Arabic Script Languages 

Full Title: Computational Approaches to Arabic Script Languages 
Short Title: CAASL-2 

Date: 21-Jul-2007 - 22-Jul-2007
Location: Stanford, CA, USA 
Contact Person: Karine Megerdoomian
Meeting Email: karine at mitre.org
Web Site: http://www.zoorna.org/CAASL2 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 26-Feb-2007 

Meeting Description:

The first workshop on "Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages", held in conjunction with COLING 2004, brought together researchers working on the computer processing of Arabic script-based languages such as Arabic, Persian (Farsi and Dari), Pashto, Urdu and Kurdish. The usage of the Arabic script and the influence of Arabic vocabulary give rise to certain computational issues that are common to all these languages despite their being of distinct language families, such as right to left direction, encoding variation, absence of capitalization, complex word structure, and a high degree of ambiguity due to non-representation of short vowels in the writing system. 

The proposed second workshop, three years after the successful first workshop, will provide a forum for researchers from academia, industry, and government developers, practitioners, and users to share their research and experience. The goal of the workshop is to provide the participants with an opportunity to exchange ideas, approaches and implementations of computational systems, to highlight the common challenges faced by all practitioners, to assess the state of the art in the field, and to identify promising areas for future collaborative research in the development of NLP resources and systems for Arabic script languages. This second workshop also provides an opportunity to assess the progress that has been made since the first workshop in 2004.

The invited speaker for this workshop will be Richard Sproat from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This workshop is being held in conjunction with the LSA 2007 Linguistic Institute at Stanford University. 

Authors of papers in any area of NLP in Arabic script-based languages are invited to apply. We also accept proposals for demonstrations of computational systems. Preference would be given to papers that extend their results and analyses to other Arabic script-based languages. Papers and demos could be on - but not limited to - any of the following topics:

-	Knowledge bases, corpora, and development of resources
-	Transliteration, transcription and diacritization
-	Morphological analysis
-	Syntactic ambiguity resolution
-	Shallow and deep parsing
-	Machine translation from and to Arabic script languages 
-	Sense disambiguation
-	Homograph resolution
-	Semantic analysis
-	Semantic web and inferences
-	Named entity recognition 
-	Information retrieval 
-	Text mining
-	Summarization
-	Text-to-speech systems

Submission Requirements

Papers should be original, previously unpublished work and should not identify the author(s). They should emphasize completed work rather than intended work. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must reflect this fact on the title page.

Submissions should be no longer than 8 pages (including figures and references). Email submissions (ps or pdf) are preferred and should be sent to both Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com and karine at mitre.org by midnight of the due date. Submissions should be in English. The papers should be attached to an email indicating contact information for the author(s) and paper's title. Formatting requirements for the final version of accepted papers will be posted as soon as they become available. 

Important Dates:

Submissions due: February 26, 2007
Notification of acceptance: April 16, 2007
Camera ready submissions: June 15, 2007

Organizing Committee:

Ali Farghaly, Oracle USA, Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com
Karine Megerdoomian, MITRE Corporation, karine at mitre.org

Program committee to be announced.

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