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ucl.ac.uk>C A L L F O R P A P E R S CONFERENCE ON THE INTERACTION BETWEEN SYNTAX AND PRAGMATICS April 5-6, 2000 University College London This conference precedes the Spring Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), which takes place at UCL on April 6-8. It is supported by the LAGB and UCL. Deadline for submissions: January 14, 2000 Invited speakers: Ruth Kempson and Luigi Rizzi The conference addresses theoretical questions posed by movement phenomena that seem to be motivated by pragmatic considerations. In Government and Binding theory movement applies freely and may therefore be exploited to satisfy conditions that hold at the interface with the interpretive system. In English, for example, a free fronting operation may lead to a focussed interpretation of the shifted constituent: 'YOUR BOOK, you should give to Paul (not mine)'. Since within the Minimalist framework movement needs to be triggered, this account is no longer available. Accordingly, recent literature proposes that interpretation-related movement is underpinned by a feature-based system. In order to maintain the hypothesis that movement is driven by feature checking, our inventory of features should be extended to include features for TOPIC, FOCUS, SPECIFICITY, DEFINITENESS and [illocutionary] FORCE etc. In the above example, movement of 'your book' would be triggered by a head carrying the feature [+FOCUS]. However, it is not obvious that notions like FOCUS have a place in syntax. For instance, in recent work Noam Chomsky advocates a radical separation of syntax and pragmatics when he talks of a "'dumb' computational system", a system that does not have access to semantic or discourse considerations. Moreover, it is not obvious whether encoding pragmatic notions in syntax allows an empirically adequate treatment of the phenomena associated with them. Alternatively, we could abandon the idea that triggers should be exclusively syntactic and allow movement as long as it has an effect on interpretation, as proposed by Tanya Reinhart. This however requires some sort of global evaluation, which in turn gives rise to questions of computational complexity. We intend this conference to be interdisciplinary. We aim to bring together researchers from both pragmatics and syntax to investigate the interface between the two in more detail. We therefore invite relevant abstracts for 30 minute talks (excluding discussion time) from syntax and pragmatics. We particularly encourage submissions relating to topic and focus but will also consider abstracts from other areas which have a bearing on the theoretical issues. - --Submissions -- Deadline January 14, 2000 Note that it is possible to submit an abstract to both the LAGB Spring Meeting and to this conference. However, an abstract can only be accepted at one of the two, so please indicate your preference if you submit to both. Abstracts should be no longer than one A4 page (8 1/2" by 11"), 11-point type single-spaced with one inch margins. Please send five anonymous copies and one camera-ready copy that includes the title, author's name, affiliation and address. Along with the abstract send a 3"x5" card listing the title, author's name, affiliation, email address, and s-mail address. The address for submissions is: Syntax/Pragmatics Conference Committee, Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. E-mail submissions Abstracts should be sent as an attachment to a message with the subject line "Abstract". They should be in plain text or Word (some other formats may also be accepted). The body of the message should contain the title and author information. E-mail submissions should be sent _after_ January 4 (but before January 14, 2000) to: dirkMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cs.rutgers.edu>ACL 2000 Preliminary Call For Papers 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 3--6 October, 2000 Hong Kong 1. Paper Sessions 1.1 Topics of Interest As was the case with last year's ACL conference, the technical sessions of the conference will be of two kinds. There will be General Sessions as well as a number of special Thematic Sessions organized around themes proposed by members of the computational linguistics community. The Thematic Sessions will run as parallel sessions, resulting in smaller and more focussed audiences. When you submit a paper to the conference, you will need to consider whether you want to present the paper in the General Sessions or in one of the Thematic Sessions, which will be listed in the final call for papers (due to come out around January 20, 2000). The conference will also feature a student workshop, tutorials, workshops, and demos. Separate calls for these will be issued shortly. For the General Sessions, papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to: pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology and morphology; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language; language-oriented information retrieval and information extraction; corpus-based language modeling; machine translation and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; approaches to coordinating the linguistic with other modalities in multi-media systems; message and narrative understanding systems. 1.2 Requirements Requirements are the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions; a separate Call for Student Workshop papers will provide the information on requirements for papers submitted to the Student Sessions. Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work and they should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. A paper accepted for presentation at the ACL Meeting cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this immediately after the title material on the first page. 1.3 Submission and Reviewing Procedure The format of submissions is the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions. Authors should submit preliminary versions of their papers for review, not to exceed 3200 words (exclusive of references). The submission procedure will be the same regardless of whether you are submitting a paper to the General Sessions or the Thematic Sessions. Electronic submissions can not be accepted. Further details on the submission procedure will be provided in the final call for papers (due to come out around January 20th, 2000). See the separate Call for Student Workshop Papers for information on submission details for papers submitted to the Student Workshop. Reviewing of papers submitted to the General Sessions will, as in previous years, be managed by an international Conference Program Committee consisting of Area Chairs, each of whom will have the assistance of a team of reviewers. Reviewing of papers for the Thematic Sessions will be managed by the chairs of the Thematic Sessions, with the assistance of teams of reviewers; final decisions on the technical program content (both General Sessions and Thematic Sessions) will be made by the Program Committee. Note that reviewing of papers will be blind. 1.4 Schedule Submissions must be received by April 7th, 2000. Electronic submissions will not be accepted. Late submissions (those arriving on or after April 8th) will be returned. Acknowledgements will be emailed soon after receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email) on June 15, 2000. Detailed formatting guidelines for the preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice. 2. Venue and Local Organization The conference will be held in Hong Kong from October 3rd through 6th, 2000. The Local Arrangements Committee is chaired by Dekai Wu; the local arrangements information will be posted soon. 3. Timetable The dates here pertain only to the General Sessions and Thematic sessions: see the separate Calls for Student Workshop Papers, Tutorial Proposals and Workshops for the timetable associated with those elements of the conference. Preliminary Call issued: December 15, 1999 Final Call for Papers issued: January 20, 2000 Paper submissions deadline: April 7, 2000 Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2000 ACL 2000 Conference: October 3--6, 2000 All queries regarding the General Sessions and Thematic sessions of ACL-2000 should be sent to acl2kMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue