18.1557, Calls: Computational Ling/Bulgaria; Historical Ling,Semantics/Germany

Tue May 22 16:17:30 UTC 2007

LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1557. Tue May 22 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.1557, Calls: Computational Ling/Bulgaria; Historical Ling,Semantics/Germany

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Laura Welcher, Rosetta Project  
       <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Ania Kubisz <ania at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations
or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in
the text.

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at 
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 22-May-2007
From: Milena Slavcheva < milena at lml.bas.bg >
Subject: A Common NLP Paradigm for Balkan Languages 

2)
Date: 22-May-2007
From: Elena Smirnova < elena.smirnova at germanistik.uni-hannover.de >
Subject: Evidentiality in European Languages

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 12:12:33
From: Milena Slavcheva < milena at lml.bas.bg >
Subject: A Common NLP Paradigm for Balkan Languages 

Full Title: A Common NLP Paradigm for Balkan Languages 

Date: 26-Sep-2007 - 26-Sep-2007
Location: Borovets, Bulgaria 
Contact Person: Milena Slavcheva
Meeting Email: milena at lml.bas.bg
Web Site: http://www.lml.bas.bg/ranlp2007 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 20-Jun-2007 

Meeting Description

In conjunction with RANLP 2007 

The workshop is partially supported by the European Commission via the project
BIS-21++, FP6 contract no. INCO-CT-2005-016639

Many things have changed at the Balkans for two years, since the previous
workshop ''Language and Speech Infrastructure for Information Access in the
Balkan Countries'' was held in conjunction with RANLP'05. The languages
spoken in this unique region attract more attention, due to the rapidly
developing field of communication and translation, and the interest to
language technologies for these languages is increasing. New markets appear,
together with newly established collaboration and new opportunities to
extend the application areas of natural language processing.

In the last decade, numerous activities aimed at incorporating the Balkan
NLP research into the widely applied models of other European languages in
the form of joint projects like MulText East, BALRIC-LING, BalkaNet, INTERA
and others. Language resources and grammatical knowledge for different
Balkan languages have been incorporated and processed within the international
NLP standards like MTE, XCES, WordNet, INTERA. As a result of
joint bilateral projects, the linguistic knowledge for some Balkan languages
has been processed according to well-known systems and models - INTEX, GATE, etc.

The unified NLP paradigm for Balkan languages ensures the development of a
common idea for creation of a Balkan multilingual pool for NLP in monolingual or
multilingual - parallel or contrastive - perspective. Not all Balkan languages
are at the same distance from the achievement of that goal. That is why the main
task of this workshop is, along with the overview of present achievements
related to the development of a common NLP paradigm of the Balkan languages, to
suggest a roadmap for the multilingual research and development carried out in
joint activities of the members of the traditional Balkan language union.

Specific topics of interest for the proposed workshop are:

- NLP-driven models of large language data sets, for instance, grammatical
dictionaries, syntactic collections, text categories, ontologies;

- collection and representation of large lexical resources conforming to
international standards;

- compilation of large multilingual collections where a given Balkan language is
paired to a wide-spread European language, or another Balkan language;

- evaluation of the results of using wide-spread NLP tools for the Balkan languages;

- investigation/evaluation of the results of mapping the well-known and widely
used NLP-driven models of the different Balkan languages.

Organisers

Elena Paskaleva and Milena Slavcheva
(Institute for Parallel Processing, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)

Programme committee
(coming soon)

Important dates

- 20 June - extended abstract, between 800 and 1000 words;
- 10 July 2007 - notification of acceptance;
- 20 August 2007 - final submission of the full paper, up to 7 pages in the
format of RANLP-2007 (see the main conference site). The authors will be
contacted if small corrections are needed, between 20 and 30 August 2007;
- 26 September 2007 - workshop with published proceedings of full papers.

Submissions should be sent to milena at lml.bas.bg

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 12:12:43
From: Elena Smirnova < elena.smirnova at germanistik.uni-hannover.de >
Subject: Evidentiality in European Languages 

Full Title: Evidentiality in European Languages 

Date: 27-Feb-2008 - 29-Feb-2008
Location: Bamberg, Germany 
Contact Person: Elena Smirnova
Meeting Email: elena.smirnova at germanistik.uni-hannover.de

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Semantics; Typology 

Call Deadline: 31-Jul-2007 

Meeting Description:
The purpose of the workshop is to investigate the linguistic realization of
evidentiality in European languages. 
The workshop will take place as part of the Annual Conference of the German
Linguistics Society (DGfS) 2008 (Bamberg, Germany). 

The notion of evidentiality is understood as marking the source and kind of
evidence a speaker bases his/her statement on. Evidential meanings may be
expressed in the lexical as well as in the grammatical layer of language and
interact or compete with neighbouring domains like modality. 
In spite of the fact that marking the source of information is essential to
human communication, the study of evidentiality has but a short tradition in
linguistics. In recent years, there have been important steps towards an
understanding of the general cognitive and universal foundations of evidential
systems. Typological case studies have shown that evidentiality is a relevant
category in the grammatical systems of numerous languages. However, it has been
generally assumed that European languages lack a grammatical system of
evidentiality. Consequently, a detailed description of the language-specific
realisations of evidentiality is yet to be carried out for European languages. 
The aim of the workshop is to collect further evidence about languages that have
both lexical and grammatical evidential markers. By comparing results of
synchronic and diachronic corpus-based studies employing different text types
and/or registers, we attempt to find out to what extent the languages under
examination have grammaticalized the expression of evidentiality (by means of
mental state predicates, adjectives, adverbs, particles, auxiliaries and mood
distinctions), and in what respects the languages differ concerning the degrees
of grammaticalization, different patterns of use and different meaning
extensions of evidential markers from one language to another.
The following issues will be addressed: 
- contrastive studies on the linguistic coding of evidentiality in different
languages;
- evidential (sub)systems and paradigms in different languages: semantic
distinctions and pragmatic functions;
- interrelations of evidential expressions with other grammatical categories
(mood, tense, aspect) and with epistemic modality;
- the diachronic rise of evidential markers and the degrees of
grammaticalization of evidentials in different languages;
- frequency distribution and specific functions of evidential markers in
different text types and / or registers.

The workshop is of interest for researchers working in the domain of grammar,
semantics, typology, grammaticalization, as well as historical linguistics. We
are looking forward to applications focusing on theoretical (e.g. defining the
category) as well as empirical issues (e.g. corpus-based studies) on evidentiality.

Presentations will be 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion. Workshop
language will be English.

Abstract submission guidelines:
Please submit an abstract (one-page, 12pt, including references) and 
include the following information: 
(a) Title of the paper 	
(b) Name of the author(s) 	
(c) Affiliation(s) 	
(d) e-mail address(es) 	

Abstracts should be sent by e-mail (preferably in PDF format, or in RTF) to the
following address: elena.smirnova at germanistik.uni-hannover.de before July 31,
2007.	 

Important Dates: 
July 31, 2007 deadline for abstracts submission 
September 1, 2007 notification of acceptance 
February 27 - 29, 2008 workshop in Bamberg

The organizers plan to publish selected papers from the workshop.

Organizers:
Gabriele Diewald, Elena Smirnova

Contact: 
elena.smirnova at germanistik.uni-hannover.de
gabriele.diewald at germanistik.uni-hannover.de

-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1557	