LINGUIST List 11.626

Mon Mar 20 2000

Calls: Corpora and NLP, Evolution of Language

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Lamia Hadrich Belguith, "Corpora and NLP" SESSION/ACIDCA'2000 International Conference
2. Stevan Harnad, Evolution of Language Conference Paris 2-6 April

******************************************************************

 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION 
 
 "Corpora and NLP" SESSION of 
 ACIDCA'2000 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 
 http://www.chez.com/acidca2000

 Monastir (Tunisia), 22-24 March 2000

*****************************************************************

 Organised by:
 University of Sfax (ENIS & FSEGS)
 Association for Innovation and Technology (AIT - Tunisia)


 Supported by:
 Minstry of Higher Education
		Ministry of Tourism, Leisure and Handicrafts
 Ministry of Communications
 State Secretary of Scientific Research and Technology
 Sfax Ville and Monastir Ville
 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
 European Language Resources Assocition


			 Sponsored by :
			 Groupe Affes
			 POULINA
			 IDERYET
			 Mac UNIVERS
		 POINT/POINT
		 IMPRIMERIE RELIURE D'ART
		 OMEGA
 	 ACADEMIC PRESS


Session Program:


Wednesday 22, March 2000

9:00 am - 9:30 am, Opening

9:30 am - 10:30 am, Plenary Lecture 1
"From Computing with Numbers to Computing with Words From
Manipulation of Measurements to Manipulation of Perceptions",
by L.A. Zadeh (USA)

10:30 am - 12:30 am, Coffee Break & Exhibition Visit

12:30 am - 2:30 pm, Lunch

2:30 - 3:30 pm, Session NLP-1 : Morphosyntactic Analysis
Chairs: Pieter Seuren (The Netherlands), Lamia H. Belguith (Tunisia)

1. "Morphosyntactic Specifiers to be Associated to Arabic Lexical
Entries-Methodological and Theoretical Aspects", by Joseph Dichy
(France)
2. "An Efficient Arabic Morphological Analysis Technique
for Information Retrieval Systems", by Imed A. Al sughaiyer
and Ibrahim A. Al kharashi (Saudi Arabia )
3. "Chunking, marking and searching a morphosyntactically 
annotated corpus for French", by Lionel Cl�ment and Alexandra Kinyon
(France)

3:30 - 4:00 pm, Coffee Break & Exhibition Visit

4:00 - 5:00 pm, Keynote Lecture NLP- KL1 : 
"Handling texts and corpuses in Ariane-G5, a complete environment
for multilingual MT", by Christian Boitet (France).

Chairs: Ruslan Mitkov (UK) and Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou (Tunisia)

5:00 - 6:00 pm, Session NLP-2 : Exploitation of Corpora
1. "Exploring Annotated Arabic Corpora, Preliminary Results",
by Mark Van Mol (Belgium) 
2. "On the Complexity of Queries for Structurally Annotated 
Linguistic Data", by Laura Kallmeyer (Germany)
3. "How to Improve Descriptive Texts Generation thanks to Corpus
 Analyses", by Laurence Balicco and St�phanie Pouchot (France)


6:00 - 7:00 pm, Free Activity

7:00 pm, Monastir City Reception

Thursday 23, March 2000

8:00 - 9:00 pm, Keynote Lecture NLP- KL2 : 
"Automatic Extraction of information from textual data", by J.-P.
Descles (France)

9:00 - 10:00 am, Session NLP-3-A: Text analysis and syntax
Chairs: Jean-Guy Meunier (Canada) and Seham El Kareh (Egypt)

1. "Text Analysis as a Prerequisite for building Adequate
Text Knowledge Bases", by Udo Hahn and Martin Romacker (Germany)
2. "Basic Structures of Modern Standard Arabic Syntax in
terms of Functions and Categories", by Everhard Ditters (The
Netherlands)
3. "Towards a more Efficient Linguistic Recovery of
 Handwriting Recognition", by Chafik Aloulou,
 Lamia Hadrich Belguith and Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou (Tunisia)

9:00 - 10:00 am, Session NLP-3-B: Anaphora resolution
Chairs: Dan Tufis (Romania) & Key-Sun Choi (Korea)

1. "Dialogue Structure as a Preference in Anaphora Resolution
Systems", by Patricio Martinez-Barco (Spain).
2. "Semantic Compatibility Techniques for Anaphora Resolution",
 by Maximiliano Saiz-Noeda, Jesus Peral and Armando Suarez (Spain)
3. ""VASISTH" an Anaphora Resolution System for Indian Languages",
by Sobha L, B. N. Patnaik (India)

10:00 - 10:30 am, Coffee Break & Exhibition Visit

10:30 - 11:30 am, Session NLP-4-A (enlver la lettre "A"):
Term extraction and automatic abstracting
Chairs: Udo Hahn (Germany), Maria Teresa Pazienza (Italy)

1. "Automatic Text Extraction Based on Classification of
Extract's Population", by Maher Jaoua and 
Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou (Tunisia)
2. "A Hybrid Technique for Automatic Term Extraction",
by Byron Georgantopoulos and Stelios Piperidis (Greece)
3. "An extraction method for text summarisation",
by Guillermo Moncecchi and Juan Jos� Prada (Uruguay).

11:30 am - 12:30 am, Plenary Lecture 2
"Categorial and Mathematical classification in Natural
Language Processing", by J.G. Meunier (Canada)
12:30 am - 2:30 pm, Lunch

2:30 - 3:30 pm, Session NLP-5 : Tagging
Chairs: Joseph Dichy (France), Hanene Ben Abdallah (Tunisia)
1. "Evaluating POS tagging under sub-optimal conditions. Or: Does
meticulousness pay ?", by Sandra K�bler and Andreas Wagner (Germany)
2. "An Arabic Interactive Multi-feature POS Tagger", by Seham El-Kareh
and Sameh Al Ansary (Egypt)
3. "High Accuracy Tagging with Large Tagsets", by Dan Tufis (Romania)

3:30 - 4:00 pm, Coffee Break & Exhibition Visit

4:00 - 5:00 pm, Keynote Lecture NLP-KL3:
"An Extended Boolean Algebra for PPC3", by Pieter A.M Seuren (The
Netherlands)

Chairs: Christian Boitet (France), Jean-Pierre Descles (France)

5:00 - 6:20 pm, Session NLP-6 : Text segmentation and Lexis

1. "A hybrid method for clause splitting in unrestricted English texts",
by Costantin 
Orasan (UK)
2. "Sub-Technical Lexis in English : A Case Study Using Corpus
Linguistics", by M. Bahloul and G. Greenall (USA)
3. "Normalisation of Association Measures for Multiword Lexical Unit
Extraction", by Ga�l Dias, Jos� Gabriel Pereira Lopes (Portugal) and
Sylvie Guillor� (France).
4. "Word Alignment for Different Language Family Based on Linguistic
Knowledge", by Jin-Xia Huang (China) and Key-Sun Choi (Korea)

6:20 - 8:00 pm, Free Activity

8:00 pm, Conference Dinner

Friday 24, March 2000

8:00 - 10:00 am, Session NLP-7 : NLP Tools
Chairs: Everhard Ditters (The Netherlands), Fumiyo Fukumoto (Japan)

1. "IBI: A NLP Approach to Question Answering Systems",
by Jose L. Vicedo and Antonio Ferrandez (Spain)
2. "Automatic Annotation of HTML Documents to Improve the Web
Research Pertinence", Omar Mazhoud and Lamia Hadrich Belguith (Tunisia)
3. "Correlating Newswire Articles with TV News Story using 
Features of TV News", by Yoshimi Suzuki and Yoshihiro Sekiguchi (Japan)
4. "Softening Fuzzy Knowledge Representation Tool with the
 Learning of New Words in Natural Language ", by Mohamed-Nazih Omri
(Tunisia)
5. "A Logic Programming Approach to Word Expert Engineering", by
Torbj�rn 
Lager (Sweden)
 
10:00 - 10:30 am, Coffee Break & Exhibition Visit

10:30 - 11:30 am, Session NLP-8 : 
Chairs: Ruslan Mitkov (UK), Belguith lamia(Tunisia)

1. "Resolving Overt Pronouns in Japanese using Hierarchical
VP Structures" by Fumiyo Fukumoto, Hiroyasu Yamada (Japan) and Ruslan
Mitkov (UK)
2. "Identification and Classification of Italian Complex
Proper Names", by Maria Teresa Pazienza and Michele Vindigni (Italy)
3. "Definite Description Resolution in Spanish" by Rafael Munoz and
Antonio Ferrandez (Spain)

11:30 - 12:30 am, Round Table & Closing

12:30 am- 2:30 pm, Lunch




**********************************


Honorary Chairs
- -------------

Ghlem Dabbeche - Association for Innovation and Technology (AIT)-Tunisia

Lotfi A. Zadeh - University of California, Berkeley


General Chairs
- ------------

Adel Alimi,
National School of engineering of Sfax (ENIS)

Lamia Belguith Hadrich,
LARIS Laboratory - Faculty of Economic Science
and Management of Sfax (FSEGS)

Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou,
LARIS Laboratory - Faculty of Economic Science
and Management of Sfax (FSEGS)


Programme Committee
- -----------------

Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton) - Chair

Roberto Basili (Universita di Tor Vergata, Rom)
Philippe Blache (Universite de Provence, Aix-en-Provence)
Christian Boitet (GETA, Grenoble)
Rebecca Bruce (University of North Carolina at Asheville)
Jean-Pierre Chanod (Xerox, Grenoble)
Khalid Choukri (ELRA, Paris)
Fathi Debili (IRMC, Tunis)
Jean-Pierre Descles (CAMS/Universite de Sorbonne, Paris)
Joseph Dichy (Lumiere University, Lyon)
Everhard Ditters (University of Nijemegen)
Fumiyo Fukumoto (University of Yamanashi)
Eric Gaussier (Xerox, Grenoble)
Udo Hahn (University of Freiburg)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College, New York)
Genevieve Lallich-Boidin (Stendhal University, Grenoble)
Bente Maegaard (Centre for Language Technology, Copenhagen)
Chafia Mankai (ISG, University of Tunis)
Tony McEnery (Lancaster University)
Jean-Guy Meunier (LANCI UQUAM, Montreal)
Andrei Mikheev (Harlequin Co., Edinburgh & University of Edinburgh)
Jean Luc Minel (CAMS/CNRS, Paris)
Manolo Palomar (University of Alicante, Spain)
Maria Teresa Pazienza (University of Roma, Tor Vergata)
Stelios Piperidis (ILPS, Athens)
Horacio Rodriguez (Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona)
Mike Rosner (University of Malta)
Monique Rolbert (Universite de Marseille)
Pieter Seuren (University of Nijemegen)
Harold Somers (UMIST, Manchester)
Keh-Yih Su (National Tsing Hua University, Taipei)
Isabelle Trancoso (INESC, Lisbon)
Agnes Tutin (Stendhal University, Grenoble)
Evelyne Tzoukermann (Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill)
Jacques Virbel (IRIT, France)
Atro Voutilainen (Conexor, Helsinki)

Additional Reviewers
- ------------------
Amit Bagga (USA)
Costantin Orasan (UK)
Catalina Barbu (UK)
Hanene Ben Abdallah (Tunisia)
Kalina Bontcheva (UK)
Lamia Labed (Tunisia)
Richard Evans (UK)
Rim Faiz (Tunisia)
Wahiba ben Abdessalem (Tunisia)
Ahmed Hadj Kacem (Tunisia)


Local Organising Committee
- ------------------------

Walid Gargouri (FSEGS, Sfax), Ahmed Masmoudi (ENIS, Sfax) - Chairs
H. Abdelkafi (FLSHS, Sfax), Chafik Aloulou (FSEGS, Sfax),
Najoua Ben Amara (ENIM, Monastir), Maher Ben Jemaa (ENIS, Sfax),
Habib Bouchhima (SEREPT, Sfax), Mohamed Chtourou (ISETG, Gabes),
Faez Gargouri (FSEGS, Sfax), Ahmed Hadj Kacem (FSEGS, Sfax),
Maher Jaoua (FSEGS, Sfax), Mohamed Jmaiel (ENIS, Sfax),
Anas Kamoun (ENIS, Sfax), Omar Mazhoud (FSEGS, Sfax),
Houssem Miled (IPEIS, Sousse), Feriel Mouria-Beji (ENSI, Tunis),
Hafedh Trabelsi (ISET, Gafsa), Mongi Triki (FSEGS, Sfax)
Mongi Triki (FSEGS, Sfax)

International Organising Committee
- --------------------------------

Fathi Ghorbel (Rice University, USA), Fakhreddine Karray
(University of Waterloo, Canada) - Chairs
Faouzi Bouslama (Hiroshima City University, Japan),
Adel Cherif (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan),
Faouzi Derbel (University of Muenchen, Germany),
Olfa Kanoun (University of Muenchen, Germany),
Slim Kanoun (University of Rouen, France),
Mansour Karkoub (Kuwait University),
Mohamed Ali Khabou (University of Missouri Columbia, USA)
Samir Lejmi (Synopsis Inc., USA)
Christian Olivier (University of Poitiers, France)
Tarek Werfelli (Cristal/Stendhal University, Grenoble)
Ismail Timimi (Cristal/Stendhal University, Grenoble)
Sofiane Sahraoui (University of Bahrain)



For any Information
- -----------------

Please contact :

Lamia Belguith
e-mail: l.belguithfsegs.rnu.tn
Mobile : (216) 9 411 060
Fax : (216) 4 279 139

Web site of the conference : http://www.chez.com/acidca2000

 ****** Evolution of Language Conference ******

 Paris, 3-6 April

 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

This is the third conference in a series concerned with the
evolutionary emergence of speech. From a wide range of disciplines, we
seek to attract researchers willing to integrate their perspectives
with those of modern Darwinism.

The aim is to bring together linguists, computer scientists,
anthropologists, palaeontologists, ethologists, geneticists,
neuroscientists, and other scientists who are concerned with the
question of the origin and evolution of language.

All useful information (scientific programme, registration information)
can be found at the following address:

http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang

Scientific programme:

http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/program.html

Registration information:

http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/registration.html

You may send a message to:

evolang-registrationcwtfrance.com

or write to

Wagonlit Evenements, 16, Rue Ballu - 75009 Paris, France

We invite you to consider sending your registration before March 15 to
benefit from reduced rates (155 Euros, instead of 230 Euros after this
date). The number of available places is limited, and priority will be
given to early registrations.


Jean-Louis Dessalles

 =================================================
 Conference : The Evolution of Language
 April 3rd - 6th , 2000
 Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications
 Paris - France
 http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang
 =================================================

- -------------------------------------------------------------

 The 4 target article whose abstracts appear below have recently
 appeared in PSYCOLOQUY, a refereed online journal of Open Peer
 Commentary sponsored by the American Psychological Association.

 OPEN PEER COMMENTARY on these target article is now invited.
 Qualified professional biobehavioural, neural or cognitive
 scientists should consult PSYCOLOQUY's Websites or send email
 (below) for Instructions if not familiar with format or acceptance
 criteria for commentaries (all submissions are refereed).

 To submit articles or to seek information:

 EMAIL: psycpucc.princeton.edu
 URLs: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html
 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc

1.
Place, Ullin T. (2000) The Role of the gand in the Evolution of
Language. Psycoloquy: 11(007) Language Gesture (1)
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?11.007

 THE ROLE OF THE HAND IN THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
 Target Article on Language Origins

 Ullin T. Place
 School of Philosophy
 University of Leeds
 School of Psychology
 University of Wales,
 Bangor, Wales
 UK

 ABSTRACT: This target article has four sections. Section I sets
 out four principles which should guide any attempt to reconstruct
 the evolution of an existing biological characteristic. Section II
 sets out thirteen principles specific to a reconstruction of the
 evolution of language. Section III sets out eleven pieces of
 evidence for the view that vocal language must have been preceded
 by an earlier language of gesture. Based on those principles and
 evidence, Section IV sets out seven proposed stages in the process
 whereby language evolved: (1) the use of mimed movement to indicate
 an action to be performed, (2) the development of referential
 pointing which, when combined with mimed movement, leads to a
 language of gesture, (3) the development of vocalisation, initially
 as a way of imitating the calls of animals, (4) counting on the
 fingers leading into (5) the development of symbolic as distinct
 from iconic representation, (6) the introduction of the practice of
 question and answer, and (7) the emergence of syntax as a way of
 disambiguating utterances that can otherwise be disambiguated only
 by gesture.

2.
Crow, Timothy J. (2000) Did Homo Sapiens Speciate on the y
Chromosome?. Psycoloquy: 11(001) Language sex Chromosomes (1)
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?11.001

 DID HOMO SAPIENS SPECIATE ON THE Y CHROMOSOME?
 Target Article on Language-Sex-Chromosomes

 Timothy J. Crow
 POWIC
 University of Oxford
 Department of Psychiatry
 Warneford Hospital
 Oxford OX3 7JX
 United Kingdom
 tim.crowpsychiatry.oxford.ac.uk

 ABSTRACT: It is hypothesised that the critical change (a
 "saltation") in the transition from a precursor hominid to modern
 Homo sapiens occurred in a gene for cerebral lateralisation located
 on the Y chromosome in a block of sequences that had earlier
 transposed from the X. Sexual selection acting upon an X-Y
 homologous gene to determine the relative rates of development of
 the hemispheres across the antero-posterior axis ("cerebral
 torque") allowed language to evolve as a species-specific mate
 recognition system. Human evolution may exemplify a general role
 for sex chromosomal change in speciation events in sexually
 reproducing organisms.

3.
Burling, Robbins (1999) The Cognitive Prerequisites for Language.
Psycoloquy: 10(032) Language Prerequisites (1)
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.032


 THE COGNITIVE PREREQUISITES FOR LANGUAGE
 Target Article on Language-Prerequisites

 Robbins Burling
 Department of Anthropology
 1020 LSA Building
 University of Michigan
 Ann Arbor MI 48109 USA
 rburlingumich.edu

 ABSTRACT: The first use of words by our early ancestors probably
 depended on four cognitive capacities: A rich conceptual
 understanding of the world around us; the ability to use and
 understand motivated signs, both icons and indices; the ability to
 imitate; the ability to infer the referential intentions of others.
 The latter three capacities are rare or absent in nonprimate
 mammals, but incipient in apes and well developed in modern humans.
 Before early humans could have begun to use words these capacities
 would have needed further development than is found in modern apes.
 It is not clear why selection favoured these skills more strongly
 in our ancestors than in the ancestors of apes.


4.
Bichakjian, Bernard H. (1999) Language Evolution and the Complexity
Criterion. Psycoloquy: 10(033) Language Complexity (1)
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.033

 LANGUAGE EVOLUTION AND THE COMPLEXITY CRITERION
 Target Article on Language-Complexity

 Bernard H. Bichakjian
 Department of French
 University of Nijmegen,
 The Netherlands
 Bichakjianlet.kun.nl
 http://welcome.to/bichakjian

 ABSTRACT: Though it is increasingly accepted in the behavioral
 sciences, the evolutionary approach is still meeting resistance in
 linguistics. Linguists generally cling to the idea that alternative
 linguistic features are simply gratuitous variants of one another,
 while the advocates of innate grammars, who make room for evolution
 as a biological process, exclude the evolution of languages. The
 rationale given is that today's languages are all complex systems.
 This argument is based on the failure to distinguish between
 complexities of form and function. The proper analysis reveals
 instead that linguistic features have consistently decreased their
 material complexity, while increasing their functionality. A
 systematic historical survey will show instead that languages have
 evolved and linguistic features have developed along a Darwinian
 line.



- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. Stevan Harnad psycpucc.princeton.edu
Editor, Psycoloquy phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Department of Electronics & fax: +44 23-80 593-281
Computer Science http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc
University of Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html
Highfield, Southampton ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM news:sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy
 Sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)