LINGUIST List 10.1061

Mon Jul 12 1999

Calls: Caucasian Colloquium, BBS/Commentators

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Wolfgang Schulze, Tenth Caucasian Colloquium of the SCE
2. Stevan Harnad, SPEECH RECOGNITION: BBS Call for Commentators

THE SOCIETAS CAUCASOLOGICA EUROPAEA

announces

THE TENTH CAUCASIAN COLLOQUIUM
MUNICH, August 2-5, 2000




FIRST CIRCULAR

The board of the Societas Caucasologica Europaea is pleased to announce
that the University of Munich shall be hosting the 10th Colloquium, from
Wednesday 2nd thru Saturday 5th of August 2000. Before continuing with
information about the conference and details concerning its topics, we
first like to give you an update of events since the colloquium in
Leiden in 1996.
Despite the efforts of our former president, Gadzhi Gamzatov, and the
organization committee in Makhachkala, it was not possible to gather in
Makhachkala in 1998; their proposal to postpone the meeting to 1999 met
with the same problems as the year before and only a local conference
was held instead. In March 1999 the board had an electronic meeting and
decided to choose Wolfgang Schulze as the new president, with all other
members of the board remaining on duty. The new venue was to be Munich.

1. Submission of abstracts and programme
Scholars working in the field of Caucasian linguistics are invited to
submit abstracts for 30 minute presentations, including at least 10
minutes of discussion. The organization committee intends to invite
several key note speakers.
The committee thinks of opening this meeting of the Societas towards
cultural studies related to the Northern Caucasus and Georgia, which
should in a first stage be limited to anthropology, literature, history,
musicology, mythology and folklore. Contributions in these fields are
warmly welcomed. The results of this experiment in extending the topics
of this meeting beyond linguistics should be discussed at the business
meeting. The business meeting will also have to include a discussion of
future activities of the Societas, a proposal for a new venue, a new
board, and a discussion of the possibilities for the installment of a
journal. Proposals and suggestion with regard to this can be adressed to
the secretary.

The home page for the tenth colloquium can be found at:
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/sce_10.htm .

Abstracts can be submitted in English, German, French or Russian. They
should not exceed one page, and should be in at least 12-point type with
one-inch (2.5 cm) margins all round. As the abstracts will be subjected
to peer review, please send two copies, one containing the author's name
and affiliation, one without the author's data. Since abstracts are to
be reproduced in the meeting handbook, they should be printed in clear
type. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st February 2000. You
will be notified if your paper has been accepted for presentation by 15
March 2000.

2. Conference fee
The conference fee of 80 DM covers the conference folder, the meeting
handbook, coffee or tea, and a reception. Additionally, the committee
plans to organize a diner party; information on this event will be given
in the second circular. Payment of the conference will only be accepted
at registration in Munich in German currency.
We hope we will be as fortunate as to be able to provide financial
support to some 10 colleagues from Russia and Georgia whose abstracts
have been accepted. 

3. Preliminary registration and accommodation
All those who wish to attend the Colloquium should fill in the enclosed
registration form and return it by 1st February 2000. The second and
third circular will only be send to those who registered. In order to be
able to limit the mailing expenses, you are kindly requested to provide
us with your e-mail adress: future circulars will be send by regular
mail only to colleagues without an access to e-mail.
Abstracts and the registration form should be send to:

SCE10 Programme Committee
Helma van den Berg
Dept. of Comparative Linguistics
University of Leiden
P.O. Box 9515
NL-2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands

Please note: all communication about the the Colloquium, its programme,
the business meeting, abstracts etc. should be directed to the
secretary, with a copy to the president if so desired.
We will try to have special arrangement with hotels close to the venue.
Information on this will be given in a separate circular towards the end
of the year. Preliminary information on housing in Munich can be
retrieved from http://www.muenchen-tourist.de/index.html .
We look forward to being able to extend a warm welcome to a large number
of participants next summer. A second circular, with the preliminary
programme and further particulars will be sent out by 1st April 2000.
The organization committee:

Wolfgang Schulze				Helma van den Berg


__________________________________
| Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze 
[Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343]

| Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
| Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
| Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
| D-80539 Muenchen
| Tel:	+89-21802486 (secr.)
| 	+89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW !
| Fax:	+89-21805345
| Email: W.Schulzemail.lrz-muenchen.de
|
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ 
_____________________________________________________

 Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article

 MERGING INFORMATION IN SPEECH RECOGNITION: 
 FEEDBACK IS NEVER NECESSARY 
 
 by Norris D., McQueen J. M., Cutler A., 

 *** please see also 5 important announcements about new BBS
 policies and address change at the bottom of this message) ***

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please reply by EMAIL by July 21st to:

 bbscogsci.soton.ac.uk

 or write to

 Behavioral and Brain Sciences
 ECS: New Zepler Building
 University of Southampton
 Highfield, Southampton
 SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

 http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/

If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and
commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates.

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection
on the Web.

_____________________________________________________________

 MERGING INFORMATION IN SPEECH RECOGNITION: 
 FEEDBACK IS NEVER NECESSARY 
 
 Norris Dennis.
 Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit,
 15, Chaucer Rd.,
 Cambridge, CB2 2EF, U.K.
 Dennis.Norrismrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
 http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/ 

 James M. McQueen and Anne Cutler 
 Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, 
 Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, 
 The Netherlands 
 James.McQueenmpi.nl and Anne.Cutlermpi.nl 
 http://www.mpi.nl 

 ABSTRACT: Top-down feedback does not benefit speech recognition; on
 the contrary, it can hinder it. No experimental data imply that
 feedback loops are required for speech recognition. Feedback is
 accordingly unnecessary and spoken word recognition is modular. To
 de fend this thesis we analyse lexical involvement in phonemic
 decision-making. TRACE (McClelland & Elman 1986), a model with
 feedback from the lexicon to prelexical processes, is unable to
 account for all the available data on phonemic decision-making. The
 modular Race model (Cutler & Norris 1979) is likewise challenged by
 some recent results however. We therefore present a new modular
 model of phonemic decision-making, the Merge model. In Merge,
 information flows from prelexical processes to the lexicon without
 feedback. Because phonemic decisions are based on the merging of
 prelexical and lexical information, Merge correctly predicts
 lexical involvement in phonemic decisions in both words and
 nonwords. Computer simulations show how Merge is able to account
 for the data through a process of competition between lexical
 hypotheses. We discuss the issue of feedback in other areas of
 language processing, and conclude that modular models are
 particularly well suited to the problems and constraints of speech
 recognition.

 KEYWORDS: feedback, modularity, phonemic decisions, lexical
 processing, computational modelling, word recognition, speech
 recognition, reading,

____________________________________________________________

To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web from the US or UK BBS Archive. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.

The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:

 http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.norris.html
 
____________________________________________________________


 *** FIVE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS ***

- ----------------------------------------------------------------
(1) There have been some very important developments in the 
 area of Web archiving of scientific papers very recently.
 Please see:

Science:
 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html
Nature:
 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
American Scientist:
 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
Chronicle of Higher Education:
 http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm

- -------------------------------------------------------------------
(2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are
 strongly encouraged to archive all their papers (on their
 Home-Servers as well as) on CogPrints:

http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

 It is extremely simple to do so and will make all of our papers
 available to all of us everywhere at no cost to anyone.

- -------------------------------------------------------------------
(3) BBS has a new policy of accepting submissions electronically.

 Authors can specify whether they would like their submissions
 archived publicly during refereeing in the BBS under-refereeing
 Archive, or in a referees-only, non-public archive.

 Upon acceptance, preprints of final drafts are moved to the
 public BBS Archive:

ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/index.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/

- ------------------------------------------------------------------
(4) BBS has expanded its annual page quota and is now appearing
 bimonthly, so the service of Open Peer Commentary can now be be
 offered to more target articles. The BBS refereeing procedure is
 also going to be considerably faster with the new electronic
 submission and processing procedures. Authors are invited to submit
 papers to:

 Email: bbscogsci.soton.ac.uk

 Web: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk
 http://bbs.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/

 INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:

http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html 

- -------------------------------------------------------------------
(5) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review

 In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal had only
 been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because
 of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota
 will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we
 treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
 biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
 would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.

 (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
 basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
 indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
 nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
 potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
 impact!).