LINGUIST List 13.1043

Mon Apr 15 2002

Calls: Heritage Langs, Computational Ling

Editor for this issue: Renee Galvis <reneelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Scott McGinnis, EXTENDED DEADLINE, CALL FOR PROPOSALS (poster session):
2. Grefenstette,Greg, FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS SPECIAL ISSUE of COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS Web as Corpus

Heritage Languages in America Second National Conference -- DEADLINE
FOR ABSTRACTS EXTENDED TO 22 APRIL
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 10:53:37 -0400

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE IN DATES FOR BOTH SUBMISSION DEADLINE AND
NOTIFICATION OF ACCEPTANCE.

The change in deadline date has been necessitated by a tremendous
surge in requests for an extended deadline past the originally
announced date of 15 April.

Heritage Languages in America: Building on our National Resources
Second National Conference Washington, D.C. October 18-20, 2002

CALL FOR POSTER SESSION PROPOSALS

The Second National Conference on Heritage Languages in America will
be held at the Sheraton Premiere at Tysons Corner, Virginia (in the
greater Washington, D.C. area) October 18-20, 2002. The conference is
being organized by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and the
National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), with support from the
University of Maryland, College Park.

Building from the foundation of the First National Conference,
convened in October 1999, in Long Beach, California, the Second
National Conference will seek to further the aims of the Heritage
Languages Initiative, a national effort to develop the non-English
language resources that exist in our communities. It will bring
together heritage language community and school leaders,
representatives from pre-K-12 schools and colleges and universities,
world-renowned researchers, and federal and state policymakers. The
goals of the Heritage Languages Initiative and this conference are to
continue to make manifest the personal, economic, and social benefits
to our nation of preserving and developing the languages spoken by
those living in this country; to build a national dialogue on this
topic; and to develop an action agenda for the next several years. 

Poster sessions will take place on Saturday, October 19. We encourage
submissions on all topics related to heritage language education, and
we suggest the following topics:

* Instruction (programs, materials and curricula, strategies, and
	assessment)
* Community-based initiatives
* Career opportunities for heritage language speakers
* Teacher preparation programs and materials
* Professional needs and opportunities (development and recruitment)
* Research
* Language and education policy

Poster sessions may focus on completed work or work in progress. They
will include a display of work and a brief oral presentation. Tables
and display boards will be provided. Presenters are responsible for
all other audiovisual equipment. They may bring their own equipment or
make arrangements with the audiovisual supplier for the
conference. For information on how to construct a poster presentation
see <http://www.lcsc.edu/ss150/poster.htm>;

Proposals should include a title (not to exceed ten words), an
abstract of no more than 250 words, and a 50-75 word abstract suitable
for inclusion in the conference program. The primary language(s)
involved should be included as well as the presenter's contact
information (including institutional affiliation and e-mail
address). All proposals may be submitted by e-mail attachment (the
preferred method) in WordPerfect or Word, or postal mail to the
following address:

Ana Maria Schwartz
Email: aschwartumbc.edu
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250
Phone: 410-455-2109

The deadline for receipt of proposals is April 22, 2002. The
conference program committee will notify those who submitted proposals
of their status no later than May 24, 2002. Abstracts received after
the deadline will be considered only if space is available.

"Competence in languages other than English is desperately needed in
the United States. Our huge and varied heritage language resources
have a definite role to play in arriving at such competence."
Joshua Fishman, Yeshiva and Stanford Universities

http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/wac_cfp.html
<http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/wac_cfp.html>; 

 

 FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

 SPECIAL ISSUE of COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

 Web as Corpus

 

 

Guest editors

Adam Kilgarriff, ITRI, University of Brighton and 
 Oxford University Press

Gregory Grefenstette, Clairvoyance Corporation 

 

 

The Web is an immense, multilingual, freely available corpus. As with
other large new corpora, computational linguists have been stimulated
by its presence. Web research includes many of the most talked about
papers of recent ACL and other meetings (eg Resnik, ACL '99; Brill,
"Does the web change everything?", ACL SIGNLL '01).

In comparison with most corpora studied to date, the web is
heterogeneous and noisy. Methods for handling the noise, and
extracting and exploiting subcorpora meeting particular criteria, are
being developed by a widening population ranging from students who
realise that it is an obvious place to obtain their corpus for free,
to companies who seek to use HLT techniques on datasets other than the
ones HLT researchers usually use.

NLP can both give to, and take from, the web (distinction due to
Dragomir Radev). It can give to the web technologies such as
summarisation, MT and question-answering. But the giving side of the
equation looks only at short-to-medium term goals. For the longer
term, for 'giving' as well as for other purposes, a deeper
understanding of the linguistic nature of the web and its potential
for CL/NLP is required. For that, we must take the web itself, in
whatever limited way, as an object of study, and uncover what it has
to tell us about the nature of language. The Special Issue will focus
on how we can use the web, rather than how we can help web users.

The issues which we will expect Special Issue papers to cover include: 

 Lexical data derived from the Web 

 Classifying Web language; the range of text types on the Web 

 Mapping Web documents onto existing ontologies; 

 implications for ontologies 

 Clustering in an open corpus 

 The multilingual Web as a resource for translation 

 CL/HLT engagement with the Semantic Web 

SCHEDULE:
Papers due: 30 April 2002 

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:

Initial submissions should be sent to: 

1. Guest Editors 

 adam.kilgarriffitri.brighton.ac.uk, grefenclairvoyancecorp.com 

2. Publishing Editor 

 Julia Hirschberg (juliaresearch.att.com) 

For initial submissions only, authors should send electronic copies
(postscript, pdf, rtf, or doc) to both the Guest Editors and the
Publishing Editor. Please indicate that the submission is for the
Special Issue of Computational Linguistics: Web as Corpus.

Questions about submissions should be directed to the two Guest
Editors, rather than the Journal or Publishing Editors.