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chibcha.demon.co.uk>Fourth International Conference hosted by the Foundation for Endangered Langauges "Endangered Languages and Literacy" ---------------------------------------- Charlotte, North Carolina, USA - 21-24 September 2000 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS When a language is endangered, it is because the community who use it may cease to do so the foreseeable future. This is often because new generations of the community are not acquiring the language, or if they do, are not using it so much as speakers in the past. Literacy, the ability to read and write a written form of the language, has often been viewed a necessary first step in maintaining and promoting use of the language. The introduction of literacy is predicated upon the development of an acceptable written form of a language, a step considered by many essential for: - the creation of grammars, dictionaries, and teaching materials; - the preservation of traditional oral literature in communities where the younger generations lack the patience to learn the texts orally. However, efforts to develop a written language and instill literacy may encounter cultural obstacles and have unforeseen consequences. For example: - the development of literacy may, over time, fundamentally alter or interrupt the oral transmission of a community's knowledge and beliefs; - the members of the community may resist efforts to introduce literacy due to cultural beliefs about, for example, the spiritual or mystical nature of oral communication; - the introduction of literacy may create divisions within the community between the literate and the illiterate that ultimately may have social or economic implications. Even within communities that are receptive to the introduction of literacy, the development of an acceptable written language may pose challenges: - there may be difficulties selecting one of several dialects upon which to base the written language; - there may be problems adapting existing alphabets, syllabaries or other writing systems to the sound system of the language; - the availability of typewriter or computer fonts may force unacceptable compromises in the orthography for the language; - the language may lack acceptable vocabulary or syntactic structures to replace in the written language suprasegmental, kinetic, and paralinguistic components of oral, face-to-face communication. Modern technologies, however, have brought additional choices to endangered language communities. For example, with tape recorders, compact disk recorders, video recorders, television, radio, and computers, it possible to create "talking" dictionaries, grammars and books, thereby eliminating the need for a written language and literacy. But these technologies are not without their own limitations: - the costs of acquiring and maintaining desired technologies may be prohibitive; - the community may lack members with the expertise to employ the desired technologies, or the resources to train members in the technologies or hire outsiders; - the community may not be willing to accept/use the chosen technologies. All these issues, and more, are relevant to our conference this year. The workshop will provide a forum for researchers and activists working for the maintenance of indigenous languages that face an uncertain future. (It is the fourth in a series of annual workshops and conferences hosted by the Foundation for Endangered Languages.) The Foundation for Endangered Languages is a registered charity in England and Wales. FEL conferences, besides being opportunities to discuss the issues from a global viewpoint, are working meetings of the Foundation, defining our overall policy for future years. Participants at the conference therefore need to be members of the Foundation. There are full facilities to join on arrival, but all proposers are strongly urged to join as soon as possible, and so take full part in the Foundation's activities in the lead-up to the conference. The dates will be 21-24 September 2000. In keeping with the theme of this year's meeting, the workshop will take place near the homeland of Sequoyah, the father of Cherokee literacy, at University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the United States. There will be a preliminary volume of proceedings distributed at the Conference. Presentations will last twenty minutes each, with a further ten minutes for discussion. All presentations should be accessible largely in English, but use of the languages of interest, for quotation or exemplification, may well be appropriate. Organizers: Blair Rudes (chair) University of North Carolina at Charlotte Nicholas Ostler Foundation for Endangered Languages, Bath, England Christopher Moseley BBC Monitoring Service Karen Johnson-Weiner St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York, USA Hassan Ouzzate Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco Programme Committee: Margaret Allen, McKenna Brown, Karen Johnson-Weiner, Tony McEnery, Eugene McKendry, Christopher Moseley, David Nash, Nicholas Ostler, Hassan Ouzzate, Jon Reyhner, Mari Rhydwen, Blair Rudes, Jane Simpson, Tasaku Tsunoda, Anthony Woodbury, Akira Yamamoto ABSTRACT SUBMISSION Abstracts should not exceed 500 words. They can be submitted in one of two ways: hard copy or electronic submission. They should be in English. A) Hard copies (or faxes): One copy should be sent to: Blair A. Rudes Department of English The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard Charlotte, North Carolina 28223-0001 USA FAX: 1-704-547-3961 TEL: 1-704-547-4230 This should have a clear short title, but should not bear anything to identify the author(s). On a separate sheet, please include the following information: NAME : Names of the author(s) TITLE: Title of the paper EMAIL: Email address of the first author, if any ADDR: Postal address of the first author TEL: Telephone number of the first author, if any FAX: Fax number of the first author, if any The name of the first author will be used in all correspondence. If possible, please also send an e-mail to Blair Rudes at <BARudesMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
rtna.daimlerchrysler.com>A final reminder- only 12 days until the submission deadline. Call for Papers THE SEVENTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MACHINE LEARNING June 29-July 2, 2000 Stanford University The Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-2000) will be held at Stanford University from June 29 to July 2, 2000, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The conference will bring together researchers to exchange ideas and report recent progress in the computational study of learning. Topics for Submission ICML-2000 welcomes submissions on all facets of machine learning, but especially solicits papers on problem areas, research topics, learning paradigms, and approaches to evaluation that have been rare at recent conferences, including: - the role of learning in natural language, vision and speech, planning and scheduling, design and configuration, logical and spatial reasoning, motor control, and more generally on learning for performance tasks carried out by intelligent agents; - the discovery of scientific laws and taxonomies, the construction of componential and structural models, and learning at multiple levels of temporal and spatial resolution; - the effect of the developers' decisions about problem formulation, representation, data quality, and reward function on the learning process; - computational models of human learning, applications to real-world problems, exploratory research that describes novel learning tasks, work that integrates familiar methods to demonstrate new functionality, and agent architectures in which learning plays a central role; - empirical studies that combine natural data (to show relevance) with synthetic data (to understand conditions on behavior), along with formal analyses that make contact with empirical results, especially where the aim is to identify sources of power, rather than to show one method is superior to others. Naturally, we also welcome submissions on traditional topics, ranging from induction over supervised data to learning from delayed rewards, but we hope the conference will also attract contributions on the issues above. Review Process The ICML-2000 review process will be structured to encourage publications covering a broad range of research and to foster increased participation in the conference. To this end, we have instituted: - area chairs who will be responsible for recruiting papers in their area of expertise and overseeing the review process for those submissions; - conditional acceptance of papers that are not publishable in their initial form, but that can be improved enough for inclusion in time to appear in the proceedings; and - a review form that requires referees to explicitly list any problems with a paper, what it would take to overcome them, and, if they recommend rejection, why it cannot be fixed in time for inclusion. The overall goal is to make the review process more like that in journals, with time for the authors to incorporate feedback from reviewers. Each submitted paper will be reviewed by two members of the program committee, with the decision about its acceptance overseen by the responsible area chair and the program chair. Paper Submission Authors should submit papers using same format and length as the final proceedings version. The detailed instructions for authors at http://www-csli.stanford.edu/icml2k/instructions.html include pointers to templates for LaTeX and Word documents. These specify two-column style, Times Roman font with 10 point type, vertical spacing of 11 points, overall text width of 6.75 inches, length of 9.0 inches, 0.25 inches between the two columns, top margin of 1.0 inch, and left margin of 0.75 inch. (The right and bottom margins will depend on whether one uses US letter or A4 paper.) Papers must not exceed eight (8) pages including figures and references. We will return to the authors any papers that do not satisfy these requirements. The deadline for submissions to ICML-2000 is MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2000. Submission will be entirely electronic by transferring papers to the ICML-2000 ftp site, as explained in the detailed instructions for authors. Authors must submit papers in POSTSCRIPT format to ensure our ability to print them out for review. Each submission must be accompanied by the paper's title, the authors' names and physical addresses, a 250-word abstract, the contact author's email address and phone number, and the author who would present the talk at the conference. Authors must enter this information into the submission form at the conference web site by FRIDAY, JANUARY 21. ICML-2000 allows simultaneous submission to other conferences, provided this fact is clearly indicated on the submission form. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings only if they are withdrawn from other conferences. Simultaneous submissions that are not clearly specified as such will be rejected. Other Conference Information The Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning will be collocated with the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Computational Learning Theory (COLT-2000) and the Sixteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-2000). Registrants to any of these meetings will be able to attend the technical sessions of the others at no additional cost. ICML-2000 will also be preceded by tutorials on various facets of machine learning. For additional information, see the web site for the conference at http://www-csli.stanford.edu/icml2k/ which will provide additional details as they become available. If you have questions about ICML-2000, please send electronic mail to icml2kMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue