linguistlist.org>
Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>
conecta.com.pl>CALL FOR PAPERS (Budapest, July 10-15, 2000) Dear Colleagues I would like to invite contributions to a PANEL on the topic: US and THEM: 'in-group' and 'out-group' meanings in language and communication (a cross-cultural view) The us and them perspective is an inherent part of human social life. People form groups that are based on nationality, family relationships, political party affiliations, race or hobby. Group membership fulfils the human desire for solidarity, consensus and co-operation. However, the unity of some entails the exclusion of others. Non-members are seen as outsiders. Alienation often gives rise to confrontational positions or conflict. The us and them perspective is ingrained in language and communication. By means of language we express our social identities and our attitudes to others. We create the sense of 'togetherness' and that of 'otherness'. We strengthen alignments and make divisions. Questions arise: How, in particular, do we as individuals and as groups linguistically project ourselves and our identities? What means do we have for incorporating others in our linguistic and cultural spaces? How in our languages do we embed devices and strategies with which we create distance and confrontation? Can some linguistic or cultural realities ease the solidarity perspective? What is the role of cross-cultural contacts in how the speaker's sense of identity, attitude, and affiliation is reinforced or redefined? How relevant is the awareness of the us and them perspective in socialisation and enculturation processes? I am interested in contributions that address a wide spectrum of problems relevant to the US and THEM distinction: cognitive, social and cultural aspects of the phenomenon, global and language (discourse) specific accounts, descriptive and critical approaches. Below I supply a sample list of topics: - phonological, morphological and syntactic devices that mark the we/they (self/other) distinction - cross-cultural variation; - devices and strategies specific to the discourse level to achieve the self-other effect; - variation in the nature of and the use of such devices/strategies across discourse types and genres; - genre specific illustrations of how the us/them distinction is managed or manipulated; - cultural variation and globalisation tendencies in the light of such devices and strategies; - creation of stereotypes through manipulation of self/other devices; - use of expressions such as substandard, error, deviation as devices excluding others; - systemic diachronic evidence for changes in the inventories of devices and strategies serving the task of discriminating between us and them; - what evidence is available regarding the acquisition of the concept of self and other; - what is the role of translation and language teaching in the understanding of how such devices and strategies are used; - the us and them perspective in multicultural work environments; - gender and 'othering' devices in language; - evidence from immigrant assimilation processes. Those who are interested in the topic, but may not come to Budapest, are also encouraged to contact me. Plans are being made to publish a volume addressing the linguistic, cognitive, social and cultural aspects of the US and THEM distinction in language and communication. Anna Duszak Institute of Applied Linguistics Warsaw University PL- 00-311 WARSAW Browarna 8/10 e-mail address: duszakMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
cedar.buffalo.edu>ACM SIGIR'99 Post-Conference Workshop on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval Berkeley, CA, August 15 - 19, 1999 Call For Participation ___________________________________________________________________________ Background - -------- This workshop is a follow-up to last year's very successful workshop on the same topic. Since the field is advancing so rapidly, it was felt that an annual workshop would be worthwhile. The focus is on the required functionality, techniques, and evaluation criteria for multimedia information retrieval systems. Researchers have been investigating content-based retrieval from non-text sources such as images, audio and video. Initially, the focus of these efforts were on content analysis and retrieval techniques tailored to a specific media; more recently, researchers have started to combine attributes from various media. The goal of multimedia IR systems is to handle general queries such as "find outdoor pictures or video of Clinton and Gore discussing environmental issues". Answering such queries requires intelligent exploitation of both text/speech and visual content. Multimedia IR is a very broad area covering both infrastructure issues (e.g. efficient storage criteria, networking, client-server models) and intelligent content analysis and retrieval. Since this is a one-day workshop, we have chosen three focus areas in the intelligent analysis and retrieval area. About the workshop - ---------------- The first focus of this workshop is on integrating information from various media sources in order to handle multimodal queries on large, diverse databases. An example of such a collection would be the WWW. In such cases, a query may be decomposed into a set of media queries, each involving a different indexing scheme. The interaction of various media sources that occur in the same context (e.g., text accompanying pictures, audio accompanying video) is of special interest; such interaction can be exploited in both the content analysis and retrieval phases. The second focus deals with examples of research using content and organization of multimedia information into semantic classes. Users pose and expect a retrieval to provide answers to semantic questions. In practice this is difficult to achieve. Building structures that encode semantic information in a fairly domain independent and robust manner is extremely difficult. A quick review of computer vision research over the last few years points to this difficulty. In many cases, image content can be used in conjunction with user interaction and domain specificity to retrieve semantically meaningful information. However, it is clear that retrieval by similarity of visual attributes when used arbitrarily cannot provide semantically meaningful information. For example, a search for a red flower by color red on a very heterogeneous database cannot be expected to yield meaningful results. On the other hand retrieval of red flowers in a database of flowers can be achieved using color. In context therefore, examples of research using content and organization of multimedia information into semantic classes will be discussed. Many systems, particularly image and video based ones require an example picture which can be used as a query (alternatively, the user may be required to draw a picture). It may be unrealistic to expect an example image to be always available. Thus, it would be useful to find ways of generating new queries. Can NLP techniques be combined with computer vision techniques to generate such queries? Or can multimodal retrieval techniques be combined to create queries suitable for image, video and audio retrieval? In general, a question is how can we create realistic queries for realistic systems. The third focus of this workshop is on evaluation techniques for multimedia retrieval. Currently, most researchers are using the standard evaluation measures defined for text documents; these need to be extended/modified for multimedia documents. There is also a high degree of subjectivity involved that needs to be addressed. Finally, we will also devote one session to discussing MPEG-7 standards and content. By the time of the workshop, the selection committee would have made their choices for standards. We will focus on the following specific topics: - content analysis and retrieval from various media (text, images, video, audio) - interaction of modalities (e.g. text, images) in indexing, retrieval - effective user interfaces (permitting query refinement etc.) - evaluation methodologies for multimedia information. We have found that researchers pay insufficient attention to it. - techniques for relevance ranking - multimodal query formation/decomposition - logic formalisms for multimodal queries - indexing and retrieval from scanned documents - e.g extracting text from images, word spotting - as a retrieval technique for both handwritten and printed documents. - testbeds for evaluating multimodal retrieval: it would be nice to have some resource sharing here since annotating these, and coming up with a good query set are difficult Participation - ----------- Two types of participation are expected. Those interested in making a presentation at this workshop should submit their full papers either in online postscript version or in hardcopy by regular mail to the address given below. The papers should not exceed 5,000 words, including figures, tables, and references. Those interested in participating, but not presenting papers, should submit a statement of interest, not to exceed 500 words. This should clearly state what aspect(s) of the workshop reflect their research interest. These will be used to select panelists. Both types of submissions are due on Friday, June 18th. Decisions will be made no later than Friday, July 2nd. In the case of paper submission, the final camera-ready papers are due on July 23rd. Working notes will be made available to all participants at the workshop. All the submissions should be sent to: Dr. Rohini K. Srihari CEDAR/SUNY at Buffalo UB Commons 520 Lee Entrance, Suite 202 Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583 Email: rohiniMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue