LINGUIST List 13.116

Fri Jan 18 2002

Calls: Morphology/Phonology Learning,General Ling

Editor for this issue: Dina Kapetangianni <dinalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Mike Maxwell, Call for Papers: Morphology/ Phonology Learning
2. Stowers, Stacey L, KWPL Call for Papers - Deadline Extension

 Call for Papers

Workshop on Morphological and Phonological Learning
 Philadelphia, PA
 12 July 2002

 Sixth Meeting of the
 ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology
 in cooperation with
 ACL Special Interest Group in Natural Language Learning



Motivation
- --------

Two groups of researchers are converging on the need to
construct morphologies and phonologies of low density
languages.

Natural language engineers hope to develop machine
translation, speech recognition, and other NLP technologies
for these languages. Meanwhile, linguists and native
speakers want to document the languages for scientific or
humanitarian reasons. (This need is often expressed
concerning endangered languages, but is not restricted to
that situation.)

This convergence of interests makes it an opportune time to
meet to discuss ways to analyze the morphology and phonology
of a language (or a group of related languages) more quickly
(and perhaps more accurately) than traditional methods have
allowed.

Techniques for morphology and phonology learning may vary
in the amount of human involvement they require. At one end
of the spectrum are tools intended to help a native speaker
(perhaps with the aid of a linguist) describe his or her own
language. At the other end are tools for unsupervised
machine learning from texts. Intermediate or hybrid
approaches are also possible.

Methodologies to be discussed in this workshop need not be
fully general: for example, a tool might be best suited to
agglutinating, fusional, or polysynthetic languages, or
specialized for compounding or reduplication.

The Workshop on Morphological and Phonological Learning
will be held July 12 2002, immediately after the ACL-02
meetings at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Pennsylvania, USA.

The workshop web site, with further information, is
http://morph.ldc.upenn.edu/maxwell/MorphologyLearning.html.
More information about SIGPHON is available at
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/sigphon, and about SIGNLL at
http://ilk.kub.nl/~signll/. The ACL-2002 website is
http://www.acl2002.org.



Topics
- ----

* Tools to help a native speaker or linguist visualize and
 describe the morphology and/or phonology of a language

* Tools for (semi-)automated discovery of morphology and/or
 phonology

* Databases and annotation tools designed for morphological
 or phonological information, particularly as these relate
 to learning

* Resources for learning (taggers, seed grammars and
 lexicons, partially annotated text, bilingual text, etc.)

* Linguistic (knowledge-based) approaches vs. empirical
 approaches; hybrid methodologies

* Evaluation/comparison of morphology learning technologies

* Adapting and reusing grammars and lexicons among related
 languages

* Application of learned morphologies and phonologies
 (proofreading, machine translation, linguistic research,
 documentation of endangered languages, speech recognition)

* Theoretical results on learnability or representation



Program Committee
- ---------------

* Mike Maxwell (Linguistic Data Consortium, chair)

* Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, SIGNLL)

* Jason Eisner (Johns Hopkins University)

* Steven Bird (University of Pennsylvania)

* Lauri Karttunen (Parc Inc.)

* John A. Goldsmith (University of Chicago)

Invited Speaker: David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins University




Schedule
- ------

* Submission Deadline: 5 April 2002

* Notification: 25 April 2002

* Camera-ready Copy Due: 21 May 2002

* Workshop: 12 July 2002

KWPL - Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics
Call for Papers Deadline Extension

KWPL is currently accepting submissions for Vol 26
The new deadline for submission is February 8, 2002
Paper topics are:
1. General Linguistics
2. Studies in Native American Languages

For more information about KWPL, please visit out website: 

http://raven.cc.ukans.edu/~lgsa/kwpl.html


Papers should be submitted to the following address:

The University of Kansas
Department of Linguistics - KWPL
1541 Lilac Lane
Blake Hall, Room 427
Lawrence, KS 66044-3177

Questions may be addressed by e-mail:

lgsaraven.cc.ukans.edu