LINGUIST List 12.535

Mon Feb 26 2001

Calls: Recent Advances in NLP, Balkan Conf (revised)

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

Directory

1. Kalina Bontcheva, Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP'2001) _/_/_/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/
2. Wayles Browne, Balkan conference (revised)

 *************************************************************
 * *
 * "RECENT ADVANCES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING" *
 * *
 * Euro Conference RANLP-2001 *
 * 5-7 September 2001 *
 * Tzigov Chark, Bulgaria *
 * *
 * http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2001/ *
 * *
 *************************************************************

 Further to the successful and competitive 1st and 2nd conferences on
 Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (selected papers from
 which were published by John Benjamins as CILT vol.136 and CILT
 vol.189), we are pleased to announce the third RANLP conference to be
 held this year.

 The conference will take the form of addresses from invited keynote
 speakers plus individual papers. All papers accepted and presented will
 be available as a volume of proceedings at the conference. There will
 also be an exhibition area and an opportunity to hold poster sessions.

TOPICS

 We invite papers reporting on recent advances in all aspects of Natural
 Language Processing. We encourage the representation of a broad range
 of areas including but not limited to: pragmatics, discourse,
 semantics, syntax, and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology, and
 morphology; text understanding and generation; multilingual NLP;
 machine translation, machine-aided translation, translation aids and
 tools; corpus-based language processing; POS tagging; parsing;
 electronic dictionaries; knowledge acquisition; terminology; word-sense
 disambiguation; anaphora resolution; information retrieval; information
 extraction; text summarisation; term recognition; text categorisation;
 question- answering; dialogue systems; speech processing;
 computer-aided language learning; language resources; evaluation; and
 theoretical and application-oriented papers related to NLP of every
 kind.

INVITED SPEAKERS

 Branimir Boguraev (IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center)
 Ed Hovy (Information Sciences Institute / USC)
 Martin Kay (Xerox Parc)
 James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University)
 Yorick Wilks (Sheffield University)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

 Galia Angelova (LML, Sofia)
 Branimir Boguraev (IBM)
 Kalina Boncheva (Sheffield University)
 Ed Hovy (Information Sciences Institute / USC)
 Eugene Charniak (Brown University, Providence)
 Dan Cristea (University of Iasi)
 Fumiyo Fukumoto (Yamanashi University)
 Maria Gavrilidou (ILPS, Athens)
 Udo Hahn (Freiburg University)
 Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto)
 Martin Kay (Xerox Parc, Palo Alto)
 Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova (Charles University, Prague)
 Lori Lamel (LIMSI, Orsay)
 Inderjeet Mani (MITRE)
 Daniel Marcu (Information Sciences Institute / USC)
 Wolfgang Menzel (University of Hamburg)
 Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton - Chair)
 Tony McEnery (Lancaster University)
 Nicolas Nicolov (IBM)
 Kemal Oflazer (Sabanci University, Istanbul)
 Jose Quesada (University of Seville)
 Manuel Palomar (University of Alicante)
 Stelios Piperidis (ILPS, Athens)
 James Pustejovsky (University of Brandeis)
 Dragomir Radev (University of Michigan)
 Allan Ramsey (UMIST, Manchester)
 Monique Rolbert (Universite de Marseille)
 Christer Samuelsson (Indigo, Montreal)
 Donia Scott (University of Brighton)
 Isabelle Trancoso (INEC, Lisbon)
 Karin Vespoor (Intelligenesis, New York)
 Piek Vossen (Saillabs, Antwerpen)
 Michael Zock (LIMSI, Orsay)
 Yorick Wilks (Sheffield University)

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

 Authors are requested to submit full-length papers which should be
 written in English and should not exceed 7 single-column pages
 (preferred font: Times New Roman 12) including figures, tables and
 references. The first page of the papers should feature the title of
 the paper, the author's name(s), the author's surface and email
 address(es), followed by keywords and an abstract. Papers should
 be submitted electronically in PDF format. In exceptional
 circumstances hard copies, Word and postscript files will also be
 accepted.

 The address for electronic paper submissions is R.Mitkovwlv.ac.uk
 (please quote the paper identifier).

 In addition, authors should pre-register by emailing the
 completed form below to K.Bontchevadcs.shef.ac.uk with subject
 line: RANLP2001 pre-registration. Submitting the information
 will return to you via email a paper ID code which needs to
 be used in all correspondence including the paper submission.

 # NAME : Name of first author
 # TITLE: Title of the paper
 # PAGES: Number of pages
 # FILES: Name of file (if also submitted electronically)
 # NOTE : Anything you'd like to add
 # KEYS : Keywords
 # EMAIL: Email of the first author
 # ABSTR:
 # Abstract of the paper
 # . . . . . .

 The papers will be reviewed by 3 members of the Programme Committee.
 Authors of accepted papers will be sent guidelines on how to produce
 the camera-ready versions of their papers for inclusion in the
 Proceedings.

SCHEDULE

 Paper Pre-registration: 27 April 2001
 Paper Submission Due: 1 May 2001
 Notification of Acceptance: 15 July 2001
 Camera-ready Paper Due: 5 August 2001
 Conference: 5-7 September 2001

LOCATION

 Tzigov Chark is a beautiful resort in the Rhodope Mountains surrounding
 the Batak Lake. It is approximately 145 km from Sofia, the capital of
 Bulgaria. The local organisers will provide a daily shuttle
 bus/conference taxi from Sofia airport to the conference location at
 an inexpensive rate.

FURTHER INFORMATION

 Further information can be obtained from

 Galia Angelova (OC Chair)
 Linguistic Modelling Laboratory
 Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
 25A Acad. G. Bonchev Str., 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria
 galialml.bas.bg

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

 A second call for papers, including final list of the invited talks,
 and the tutorial speakers will come out in April. All related
 information will be regularly updated on the conference website (see
 below).

TUTORIALS

 RANLP-2001 will be preceded by a 2-day tutorial. Following the RANLP 95
 and RANLP 97 tradition, the conference will be held in the picturesque
 Tzigov Chark resort overlooking Batak Lake in the Rhodopi Mountains,
 Bulgaria. See (http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2001/) for a preliminary list of
 the tutorial speakers.

SPONSORS

 The conference is funded by the European Commission, DGXII through
 Human Potential Programme for High-Level Scientific Conferences
 (contract number HPCF-2000-00329).

CONFERENCE WEB SITE

 http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2001/

 Information about converting your files to PDF will be available
 shortly on the conference Web site; see also
 http://192.150.14.203/index.pl?BP=NS

CONFERENCE MAILING LIST

 If you would like to receive information you may subscribe to the
 conference mailing list by sending an e-mail to
 majordomodcs.shef.ac.uk with a body (no subject) 'subscribe
 ranlp2001'. When you receive the confirmation e-mail, please make sure
 that you return the requested code to confirm your subscription.

CALL FOR PAPERS

CONFERENCE ON THE BALKAN SPRACHBUND PROPERTIES
within the framework of the Spinoza Project, http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/spls
June 7-9 2001, University of Leiden, the Netherlands

Invited speakers: Zeljko Boskovic, Wayles Browne, Victor Friedman, Jouko
Lindstedt, Virginia Motaparnyane Hill, Marisa Rivero, Arhonto Terzi,
Zuzanna Topolinska

The Balkan languages share sets of typological properties which have
contributed to the shaping of a uniform areal typological profile,
referred to as �Balkan language union� or �Balkan Sprachbund�. A
typological language property is assumed to be areal if (a) shared by
at least three languages of the area, at least two of which belong to
different genetic families, but (b) not present in all the languages
of the genetic family to which the language of the area belongs (if it
belongs to a language family, at all). Since the amount, the extent
and the limit of areal typological properties necessary for granting
membership into the Balkan Sprachbund, has not and cannot be assessed
independently, linguistic discussion on Balkan Sprachbund membership
has centered around specific properties. Different analyses single
out different arrays of Balkan Sprachbund properties, though most of
them agree on one phonological property � the presence of the schwa
phoneme � and six grammatical properties: (1) substitution of the
synthetic declension markers by analytic ones; (2) grammaticalization
of the category of definiteness through postpositive definite
articles; (3) pronominal doubling of objects; (4) analytic expression
of futurity; (5) analytic Perfect with an auxiliary verb corresponding
to _have_; (6) loss of the infinitive and its substitution by
subjunctive clauses. Two Balkan Slavic languages � Macedonian and
Bulgarian, two Balkan Romance languages � Aromanian and
Megleno-Romanian, as well as Albanian have been said to qualify for
full membership; Romanian, Modern Greek, Balkan Romani and a group of
Serbo-Croatian, or rather Serbian dialects � the Torlak ones � have
been treated as peripheral members; Standard Serbo-Croatian has been
very marginally included; while Turkish has been treated as a �donor�
language.

Papers within any framework on any Balkan Sprachbund property, involving
any of the Balkan languages, as well as languages outside the Balkans which
exhibit areal properties encountered on the Balkans (e.g. the languages of the
Caucasus or the Volga area) invited. Papers dealing with more than one
language are strongly preferred.

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words as attachments to an e-mail
message to o.tomiclet.leidenuniv.nl. Deadline March 15. Notification of
acceptance by May 1.