28.5146, Calls: Comp Ling, Gen Ling, Morphology, Text/Corpus Ling, Typology/Poland

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-5146. Wed Dec 06 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.5146, Calls: Comp Ling, Gen Ling, Morphology, Text/Corpus Ling, Typology/Poland

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Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2017 23:56:26
From: Aleksandrs Berdicevskis [aleksandrs.berdicevskis at lingfil.uu.se]
Subject: Measuring Language Complexity

 
Full Title: Measuring Language Complexity 
Short Title: MLC 

Date: 15-Apr-2018 - 15-Apr-2018
Location: Torun, Poland 
Contact Person: Aleksandrs Berdicevskis
Meeting Email: aleksandrs.berdicevskis at lingfil.uu.se
Web Site: http://www.christianbentz.de/MLC_index.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; General Linguistics; Morphology; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Typology 

Call Deadline: 01-Feb-2018 

Meeting Description:

Measuring Language Complexity (MLC) is a workshop held at the Faculty of
Languages NCU (Collegium Humanisticum, Bojarskiego 1, Torun) as a satellite
event of EVOLANG XII in Torun, Poland. 

It aims to bring together researchers from different fields who are interested
in measures of language complexity. To ensure comparability and
reproducibility, participants are required to measure - with their metric of
choice - the linguistic complexity of a predefined set of 37 language
varieties belonging to 7 families. The results, as well as their mutual
agreement/disagreement will be discussed at the workshop.


Call for Papers:

An influential line of thinking within evolutionary linguistics is that
languages change in response to socioecological pressures, i.e. adapt to their
environmental niches. Language complexity is a common parameter to test for
such adaptation. It is, however, notoriously difficult to define and measure.
Virtually every study of complexity uses its own operationalization and
measure. On one hand, this diversity is beneficial for the field, since an
intricate phenomenon is being studied from different angles. On the other
hand, the comparison of different studies is inhibited. This is particularly
problematic if different measures yield different conclusions, since there
currently is little consensus about how measures themselves can be evaluated
and compared. 

To overcome this, we organize a shared task (shared tasks are widely used in
computational linguistics) on linguistic complexity, namely: Measure and
compare the complexities of a set of 37 language varieties of 7 families. The
list of languages is given at the Data section of the workshop webpage. The
participants are free to choose whether they want to measure just one facet of
complexity (e.g. phoneme/grapheme inventory, morphology, word order), or try
to develop an overall complexity measure. The complexity measure can be based
on any conceivable metric. The submissions, however, have to clearly state: 1)
what exactly is being measured (e.g. overspecification, lexical diversity,
irregularity, verbosity, opacity etc.); 2) how the measure is calculated, and
the theoretical rationale behind the method; 3) the resulting value for each
language. 

To facilitate the comparability of different measures, we request that the
participants who apply corpus-based measures use the corpora available via the
Universal Dependencies project, v2.1. The subsample to be used for this
workshop is downloadable from the Data section of the workshop webpage.
Participants are free to decide which level of annotation they want to use.
Plain-text files are also available for those who do not need any annotation.
Participants who do not need corpora are exempt from this requirement. We also
require that the participants submit all relevant calculations and scripts as
supplementary materials (after acceptance). 

The presentation format will depend on the number and quality of submissions.
We will allot a slot for a detailed discussion of the proposed measures, their
strengths, drawbacks and comparability, their relation to each other, and the
possibilities to flesh out uniform approaches to measure language complexity
and its evolution. We consider writing a joint paper based on the conclusions
of the workshop.

Submission:

Max. 4 pages excluding references, please use the Evolang templates
(http://evolang.org/submissions). You have to submit three files:

1) a pdf of the paper (anonymized according to the Evolang rules)
2) a .txt file with your results (use the .csv template provided with the
dataset and save it as .txt)

After acceptance you will also be required to submit to us 

3) a single archive with your supplementary materials (SM). You may decide
yourself what should be included into the SM, the main requirement is that we
should be able to reproduce your results using your SM without additional
explanations. SM should also be referenced in the main text. 

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mlc2018

We aim to publish electronic proceedings of the workshop.




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