linguistlist.org>
Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>
unimi.it>
This is to announce a second time that September 30 is
the deadline for submissions to the first issue of the
syntax-semantics newsletter _Snippets_. The editorial
statement for the journal follows.
- ----------------------------------------------------------
Journal title: SNIPPETS.
Editors: Carlo Cecchetto, University of Siena
Caterina Donati, University of Urbino
Orin Percus, NSF/ University of Milan
EDITORIAL STATEMENT.
1. Purpose.
The aim of _Snippets_ is to publish specific remarks that motivate
research or that make theoretical points germane to current work. The
ideal contribution is the ideal footnote: a side remark that taken on
its own is not worth lengthy development but that needs to be said.
The best examples of what we have in mind are the earliest _Linguistic
Inquiry_ squibs. Some of these posed unobserved puzzles. For
instance, a squib by Postal and Ross in LI 1:1 ("A Problem of Adverb
Preposing") noted that whether or not we can construe a
sentence-initial temporal adverb with an embedded verb depends on the
tense of the matrix verb. A squib by Perlmutter and Ross in LI 1:3
("Relative Clauses with Split Antecedents"), challenging the
prevailing analyses of coordination and extraposition, noted that
conjoined clauses neither of which contain a plural noun phrase can
appear next to an "extraposed" relative that can only describe groups.
Other squibs drew attention to particular theoretical assumptions.
For instance, a squib by Bresnan in LI 1:2 ("A Grammatical Fiction")
outlined an alternative account of the derivation of sentences
containing _believe_ and _force_, and asked whether there were
principled reasons for dismissing any of the underlying assumptions
(among them that semantic interpretation is sensitive to details of a
syntactic derivation). A squib by Zwicky in LI 1:2 ("Class
Complements in Phonology") asked to what extent phonological rules
refer to complements of classes. None of these squibs was more than a
couple of paragraphs; all of them limited themselves to a precise
question or observation.
One encounters many short comments of this kind in the literature
of the seventies. We feel that there no longer is a forum for them.
We want _Snippets_ to help fill that gap.
2. Content.
We will publish notes that contribute to the study of _syntax and
semantics in generative grammar_. The notes are to be brief,
self-contained and explicit. They may do any of the following things:
a. point out an empirical phenomenon that goes against accepted
generalizations or that shows that some aspect of a theory is
problematic;
b. point out unnoticed minimal pairs that fall outside the scope
of any existing theory;
c. point out an empirical phenomenon that confirms the
predictions of a theory in an area where the theory has not
been tested;
d. explicitly describe technical inconsistencies in a theory or
in a set of frequently adopted assumptions;
e. explicitly describe unnoticed assumptions that underlie a
theory or assumptions that a theory needs to be supplemented
with in order to make desired predictions;
f. propose an idea for a pilot experiment in language acquisition
or language processing that directly bears on theoretical
issues;
g. call attention to little-known or forgotten literature in
which issues of immediate relevance are discussed.
3. Submission details.
We will solicit submissions issue by issue. A new submission
deadline will be announced for each issue, and the submissions that
we receive we will consider only for that issue.
Submissions are to be a _maximum_ of 500 words (including examples),
with an additional half page allowed for diagrams, tables and
references. Given that we envision the submissions themselves as
footnotes, _the submissions may not contain footnotes of their own_.
The ideal submission is one paragraph; a submission of five lines is
perfectly acceptable. _We will not consider abstracts_.
THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR THE FIRST ISSUE OF _SNIPPETS_ IS
SEPTEMBER 30, 1999. We will accept electronic submissions at the
address
snippetsunimi.it
Paper submissions should be sent to
Caterina Donati
Facolta' di Lingue
Universita' di Urbino
Piazza Rinascimento 7
61029 Urbino
ITALY
We strongly encourage electronic submissions. Electronic
submissions may take the form of the text of an e-mail message, or
an attached file. The attached file should be a simple text file,
a Word file (Mac or Windows), or a Rich Text Format (RTF) file.
All submissions must state the name and affiliation of the
author(s), and a (postal or electronic) return address.
4. Editorial policy.
Submissions will be reviewed by our editorial board, and review will
be name-blind both ways. While we guarantee a response within 3
months of submission, _we will only provide a yes/no response to the
submitter_. We will not request revisions (barring exceptional
cases). Space constraints mean that we may reject a large proportion
of submissions, but with this in mind we allow resubmission (once) of
the same piece.
5. Distribution.
Our initial plan is to publish 2 or 3 times a year, with a maximum of
10 pages for each edition. The first issue is intended for January
2000. Our goal in publishing this newsletter is to provide a service
to the linguistics community, and _Snippets_ will therefore be _free_
and _without copyright_. There will be a limited number of copies,
which we will send to institutions on request. Individuals who wish
to take advantage of the newsletter should therefore ask their
institutions to request a copy, and make their own copy of the
institution's version. Individuals who are not affiliated with an
institution should contact us at the address snippetsunimi.it.
6. Review Board.
Sigrid Beck (University of Connecticut)
Rajesh Bhatt (University of Texas)
Valentina Bianchi (Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa)
Daniel Buring (UC Santa Cruz)
Danny Fox (Harvard Society of Fellows)
Roumyana Izvorski (USC)
Hisatsugu Kitahara (Keio University)
Josep Quer (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)
Norvin Richards (MIT)
Anna Roussou (University of Cyprus)
Uli Sauerland (Universitaet Tuebingen)
William Snyder (University of Connecticut)
Michal Starke (University of Geneva)
- ------------------------------------------------------------
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clsp.jhu.edu>Dear Colleague: I am writing in connection with the summer workshop on Language Technology we are preparing to host at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing in the summer of 2000. You may already have a good idea about the nature of these summer workshops which we have hosted every year at Hopkins since 1995. If not, I have included a short summary description. If you need additional information, please feel free to ask me or visit our web pages at http://www.clsp.jhu.edu . These workshops have attempted to identify specific research topics (suitable for a six week team exploration) on which progress is needed to advance the state of the art in various fields of Language Technology (such as ASR, text-to-speech, TDT, MT, information retrieval, summarization, etc). The research topics of the participating teams in previous workshops can serve as a good example (see below). Having identified such topics in an organizational conference (see below), we then attempt to get the best researchers to work on them. The purpose of this communication is to ask you for help in identifying suitable topics. Would you be interested and available to participate in the 2000 Summer Workshop (July 10 - August 18, 2000)? If so, we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration. It need only be a couple of paragraphs detailing the problem and a rough agenda to be addressed by the team in the 6-week period. If your proposal is chosen (by an independent review panel), we would invite you to join us for the Organizational Conference at Airlie, VA, November 12-14, 1999 (as our guest), for further discussions aimed at consensus. If, at Airlie, a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the four to be pursued during the summer, we would expect you to be available for participation (and perhaps team leadership) in the six week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will take an active role in pursuing it. We would like to receive proposals by September 27, 1999 so that we may begin the review process. They may be faxed (410-516-5050), sent via return e-mail, or regular mail (CLSP, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Barton 320, Baltimore, MD 21218). Please let us know via return e-mail whether you are interested in submitting a proposal. Regards, Frederick Jelinek, Director Center for Language and Speech Processing Johns Hopkins University Information on Workshop 2000 The 6-week workshop at Johns Hopkins University on language engineering brings together teams of leading professionals and students to advance the state of the art. The professionals would normally be university professors and industrial and governmental researchers working in widely dispersed locations. The graduate students will be familiar with the field and will be selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. The undergraduates will be entering seniors who are new to the field and who have shown outstanding academic promise. They will be selected through a national search. Undergraduate participation began in 1998 with the intent of broadening the appeal of language engineering amongst students considering graduate studies. Proposals for research projects are being solicited from a wide range of academic and government institutions, as well as from industry. All proposals will be reviewed by an independent panel. Those chosen will be presented at the Airlie conference to which both presenters and leading researchers will be invited. Out of these presentations and the discussion which will follow, the four research topics for WS00 will emerge. The primary goal of the workshop is to establish research directions and educate students in language technology. Additional expected benefits of the workshop are the recruitment of students into language engineering research; the creation, collection, and dissemination of tools and data for language engineering research; and the establishment of fruitful and long-lasting collaborations. Workshop 1999 investigated four topics: Statistical Machine Translation, Language Independent Acoustic Modeling, Topic-Based Novelty Detection, and Normalization of Non-Standard Words.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue