21.4332, Calls: General Linguistics/Spain

Sat Oct 30 21:30:25 UTC 2010

LINGUIST List: Vol-21-4332. Sat Oct 30 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.4332, Calls: General Linguistics/Spain

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1)
Date: 29-Oct-2010
From: Brian Nolan [brian.nolan at gmail.com]
Subject: 44th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2010 17:27:57
From: Brian Nolan [brian.nolan at gmail.com]
Subject: 44th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea

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Full Title: 44th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea 
Short Title: SLE 2011 

Date: 08-Sep-2011 - 11-Sep-2011
Location: Logroño (La Rioja), Spain 
Contact Person: Bert Cornillie
Meeting Email: sle at arts.kuleuven.be
Web Site: http://www.societaslinguistica.eu/ 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2011 

Meeting Description:

SLE meetings provide a forum for high-quality scientific research in 
linguistics. 

Plenary Speakers:

Bas Aarts (London)
Martin Everaert (Utrecht)
Adele Goldberg (Princeton)
Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy (Murcia) 
Ruth Wodak (Lancaster)

Social Programme

There will be a reception (included in the registration fee) and a conference
dinner. On Sunday afternoon there will be a post-conference excursion. 
Further information will be given in the second circular.

How to Get to Logroño

Logroño, the capital of La Rioja, is located in the North of Spain, 336 Km 
from Madrid, 478 Km from Barcelona, 171 Km from Zaragoza and 137 Km 
from Bilbao. The local airport offers daily flights to the international airport of 
Madrid. Other important international airports are Bilbao and Zaragoza, 
from where you can travel to Logroño by bus or by train.

Local Organizing Committee:

Chair: Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 
Secretary: Sandra Peña Cervel 
Treasurer: Andrés Canga
Members: María Pilar Agustín, Asunción Barreras, Almudena Fernández, 
Rosa Mª Jiménez, Javier Martín, Juan Manuel Molina, Lorena Pérez, 
Roberto Torre.

SLE Conference Manager:

Bert Cornillie (Leuven)

Scientific Committee:

Chair: Letizia Vezzosi (Perugia), Members: Laura Alba-Juez (Madrid, 
UNED), Johanna Barðdal (Bergen), Delia Bentley (Manchester), Marcella 
Bertuccelli (Pisa), Walter Bisang (Mainz), Kasper Boye (Copenhague), Anna 
Cieslicka (Poznan/TAMIU Laredo), Giuglielmo Cinque (Venice), João Costa 
(Lisbon), María Josep Cuenca (Valencia), Michael Daniel (Moscow), Kristin 
Davidse (Leuven), David Denison (Manchester), Ursula Doleschal (Wien), 
Patricia Donegan (Honolulu), Mirjam Fried (Prague), Francisco Gonzálvez 
(Almería), Stefan Th. Gries (UC Santa Barbara), Youssef Haddad (Florida), 
Liliane Haegeman (Ghent), Marja-Liisa Helasvuo (Turku), Daniel Hirst (Aix-
en-Provence), Hans Henrich Hock (Urbana-Champaign), Willem Hollmann 
(Lancaster), Michael Israel (Maryland), Gunther Kaltenboeck (Viena), 
Stanislav Kavka (Ostrava), Seppo Kittila (Helsinki), Grzegorz Kleparski 
(Rzeszow), Bernd Kortmann (Freiburg), Livia Kortvelyessy (Kosice), Gitte 
Kristiaensen (Madrid, Complutense), Leonid Kulikov (Leiden), Karen 
Lahousse (Leuven), Meri Larjavaara (Turku/Åbo), Maria Luisa Lecumberri 
(Vitoria-Gasteiz), Elisabeth Leiss (München), María Rosa LLoret 
(Barcelona), María José López-Couso (Santiago), Ricardo Mairal (Madrid, 
UNED), Andrej Malchukov (EVA, Leipzig), Amaya Mendikoetxea (Madrid, 
UAM), Lavinia Merlini (Pisa), Laura Michaelis (UC, Boulder), Edith 
Moravcsik (Wisconsin, Milwaukee), Jan Nuyts (Antwerp), Miren Lourdes 
Onederra (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Hamid Ouali (Wisconsin, Milwaukee), Eric 
Pederson (Oregon), Paola Pietrandrea (Roma III), José Pinto de Lima 
(Lisbon), Vladimir Plungjan (Moscow), Nikolaus Ritt (Viena), Nicoletta 
Romeo (Sydney), Fernando Sánchez Miret (Salamanca), Andrea Sansò 
(Como), Stephan Schmid (Zürich), Roland Schuhmann (Jena), Elena 
Seoane (Santiago), Augusto Soares da Silva (Braga), Jae Jung Song 
(Otago), Roeland van Hout (Nijmegen), Arie Verhagen (Leiden), Guido 
Vanden Wyngaard (Brussels), Elly Van Gelderen (Arizona), Anna Verschik 
(Tallinn), Björn Wiemer (Mainz), Jan-Wouter Zwart (Groningen). 

Call For Papers

Functionally motivated computational approaches to models of language 
and grammar

Within the framework of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica 
Europaea, to be held at the Universidad de La Rioja (Logroño, Spain), 8-11 
September 2011, we would like to propose a workshop on functionally 
motivated work in computational approaches to models of language and 
grammar.

Convenors: 
Brian Nolan (Institute of Technology Blanchardstown Dublin Ireland)
Carlos Periñán Pascual (Universidad Católica de San Antonio, Murcia 
Spain)

In this call for papers we propose to host a workshop under the SLE to 
examine and discuss recent and current work in the use of functional, 
cognitive and constructional approaches to the computational modelling of 
language and grammars. 

While recognising that in recent times much work has concentrated on 
statistical models, we wish to examine in particular computational models 
that are linguistically motivated and that deal with problems at the interfaces 
between concept, semantics, lexicon, syntax and morphology. Many 
functionally oriented models of grammar, including Functional 
Grammar,Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and reference Grammar 
have lent them selves to work as diverse as lexically motivated machine 
translation from Arabic to English (Nolan and Salem 2009, Salem and Nolan 
2009a and 2009b) and to the conceptual ontological work on FunGramKB 
(Periñán-Pascual & Arcas-Túnez 2005, 2007, 2010a, 2010b; Periñán-
Pascual & Mairal Usón 2009) plus recent work undertaken within the 
Lexical-Constructional Model (Mairal Usón, R. & Francisco Ruiz de 
Mendoza. 2008 and 2009, Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José and 
Mairal, Ricardo. 2008, Guest,  Nolan & Mairal-Uson. 2009) and Role and 
Reference Grammar (Van Valin 2005, Van Valin & LaPolla 1997).

Indeed, similar work has been ongoing quietly within the domain of Sign 
Linguistics where various initiatives based upon variations of the original 
Mental Spaces Model (Fauconnier 1994) have been productively used in 
the creation of digital intelligent avatars to translate spoken/written 
languages into several Sign Languages (Morrissey & Way 2006, Cassell et 
al 2000, Prendinger & Ishizuka 2010). Sign Languages, as visual gestural 
languages, pose interesting problems for functional models of grammar 
(Leeson & Nolan 2008, Leeson et al 2006).

The organisers of this workshop are a European group of linguists, 
computational linguists and computer scientists who, since the 2004 Role 
and Reference Grammar International Conference in Dublin have 
formulated computational proposals in different areas concerned with the 
lexicon and concept ontologies, and the computational processing of the 
syntax, morphology and semantics of a variety of languages. Thus far, 
these actual computational projects have encompassed 1) rule-based 
lexicalist interlingua bridge machine translation, 2) ontological engineering 
of concepts that enhance and enrich logical structures in a machine 
tractable way, 3) the implementation of a unified lexical meta-language in 
software, and 4) the parsing of complex sentences. The languages that 
have undergone a computation treatment in RRG have included English, 
Arabic and Spanish, and others.

A consequence of this computational work has been the enrichment of the 
theoretical elements of the RRG theory, especially in its semantics and 
lexical underpinnings where they connect with concepts, and the building of 
frame based applications in software that demonstrate its viability in natural 
language processing. Furthermore, this computational work provides 
compelling evidence that functional approaches to grammar have a positive 
and crucial role to play in natural language processing. We claim that a 
functional approach to grammar delivers a credible and realistic linguistic 
model to underpin these kinds of NLP applications. 

The main topics of the workshop will include, but are not limited to, the 
following:
-The deployment of functional models in parse and generation
-The architecture of the lexicon
-The linking system between semantics, lexicon and morphosyntax
-Interpretation of the linguistic model into an algorithm specification
-Issues for the layered structure of the clause and word
-Complexity issues 
-Concept formation
-Linguistically motivated computational approaches to gesture in language

We would like to present a forum for a functional and cognitive linguistic, 
computational research agenda, based around an inclusive model 
consisting of the various cognitive and functional approaches to grammar. In 
sum, the aim of this workshop is to offer a forum for discussion and critical 
evaluation of the full gamut of research projects concerned with a broadly 
functional computational linguistics and that also contributes to our 
understanding of languages in a functionally oriented way.

Procedure:
Abstracts are invited for 20 minute presentations with 10 minute discussion. 
Interested researchers and linguists are invited to email 
brian.nolan at gmail.com with their name, affiliation and provisional abstract 
of 500 words by 10 November 2010.

Important dates
Submission of provisional abstract: 10 November 2010.
Notification of acceptance of workshop proposal: 15th December 2010.
If the workshop proposal is accepted then all abstracts will need to be 
submitted to SLE by 15th January 
2011, via the SLE conference website: http://sle2011.cliap.es
Notification of acceptance: 31st March 2011
Registration: From April 2011 onwards
Conference: 8-11 September 2011

Selected references
Cassell, J., Sullivan, J., Prevost, S., and Churchill, E. (Eds.). 2000. 
Embodied Conversational Agents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles. (1994). Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning 
Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge University Press.  
Cambridge.
Guest, Elizabeth, Brian Nolan and Ricardo Mairal-Uson. 2009. Natural 
Language processing applications in an RRG Framework. Proceedings of 
the 10th International Role and Reference Grammar Conference. University 
of California, Berkeley USA. 
Leeson, Lorraine and Brian Nolan. 2008. Digital Deployment of the Signs of 
Ireland Corpus in Elearning. Language Resources and Evaluation 
LREC2008 - 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign 
Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora. 
Marrakech, Morocco.
Leeson, Lorraine, John Saeed, Deirdre Byrne-Dunne, Alison Macduff and 
Cormac Leonard. 2006. Moving Heads and Moving Hands: Developing a 
Digital Corpus of Irish Sign Language. The 'Signs of Ireland' Corpus 
Development Project. IT&T Conference (www.ittconference.ie). IT Carlow, 
Ireland. http://www.tara.tcd.ie/jspui/handle/2262/1597
Mairal Usón, R. and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza. 2008: New challenges for 
lexical representation within the Lexical-Constructional Model (LCM). In 
Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses. Universidad de La Laguna. 
Mairal Usón, Ricardo and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza. 2009: Levels of 
description and  explanation in meaning construction. In Ch. Butler and J. 
Martín Arista (eds.). Deconstructing Constructions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: 
John Benjamins. 
Morrissey, Sara and Andy Way. 2006. Lost in Translation: the Problems of 
Using Mainstream MT Evaluation Metrics for Sign Language Translation. In 
Proceedings of Strategies for developing machine translation for minority 
languages: 5th SALTMIL Workshop on Minority Languages. 
Genoa, Italy. pp.91-98
Nolan, Brian and Yasser Salem. 2009. UniArab: An RRG Arabic-to-English 
machine translation software. Proceedings of the Role and Reference 
Grammar International Conference. University of California, Berkeley USA.
Periñán-Pascual, Carlos, and Francisco Arcas-Túnez. 2005. 
Microconceptual-Knowledge Spreading in FunGramKB. Proceedings on the 
9th IASTED International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft 
Computing. 239-244, ACTA Press, Anaheim-Calgary-Zurich.
Periñán-Pascual, Carlos and Francisco Arcas Túnez. 2007. Cognitive 
modules of an NLP knowledge base for language understanding. 
Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 39, 197-204.
Periñán-Pascual, Carlos and Francisco Arcas Túnez. 2010a. Ontological 
commitments in FunGramKB. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 44, 27-
34.
Periñán-Pascual, Carlos and Francisco Arcas Túnez. 2010b. The 
architecture of FunGramKB. Proceedings of the Seventh International 
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, European Language 
Resources Association (ELRA), 2667-2674.
Periñán-Pascual, Carlos and Ricardo Mairal Usón. 2009. Bringing Role and 
Reference Grammar to natural language understanding. Procesamiento del 
Lenguaje Natural 43, 265-273.
Prendinger, Helmut and Mitsuru Ishizuka. 2010. Life-Like Characters: Tools, 
Affective Functions, and Applications (Cognitive Technologies). Springer.
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José and Mairal, Ricardo. 2008: 
'Levels of description and constraining factors in meaning construction: an 
introduction to the Lexical Constructional Model'. Folia Linguistica 42/2 
(2008), 355-400.Salem, Y., Hensman, A., and Nolan, B., 2008a. 
Implementing Arabic-to-English machine translation using the Role and 
Reference Grammar linguistic model. In Proceedings of the 
Eighth Annual International Conference on Information Technology and 
Telecommunication (IT&T 2008), Galway, Ireland. 
Salem, Y. and Nolan, B., 2009a. Designing an XML lexicon architecture for 
Arabic machine translation based on Role and Reference Grammar. In 
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Arabic Language 
Resources and Tools (MEDAR 2009), Cairo, Egypt. 
Salem, Y. and Nolan, B., 2009b. UNIARAB: An universal machine translator 
system for Arabic Based on Role and Reference Grammar. In Proceedings 
of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Germany (DGfS 
2009). 
Van Valin, R., 2005. Exploring the Syntax-Semantic Interface. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. 
Van Valin, R. and LaPolla, R., 1997. Syntax: Structure, Meaning, and 
Function.Cambridge University Press.

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