LINGUIST List 13.121

Sat Jan 19 2002

Calls: Computational Ling, Morphology & Phonology

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

Directory

1. Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL-02 Workshop CFP: Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages
2. Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL-02 Workshop CFP: Morphological and Phonological Learning

WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT
First Call for Papers

Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages

ACL-2002
University of Pennsylvania
Thursday 11 July, 2002

This workshop is a sequel to the workshop on Computational Approaches
to Semitic Languages that was held at COLING98 in Montreal. Since that
time, there have been various other workshops, but these have mostly
turned out to be either rather applications-oriented, or rather
language specific, or both. Whilst not neglecting applications, the
present workshop aims to attract submissions that contribute
significantly to theoretical insights concerning computational
frameworks underlying the processing of Semitic languages in
general. Morphology and/or phonology would seem to be promising areas
of investigation in this sense. An effort will also be made to
highlight submissions that concern a representative set of languages.

Areas of interest include (but are not limited to): 

- Orthographic Representation 
- Morphological/Phonological Models 
- Speech Applications 
- Syntax, Parsing and Generation 
- Semantics 
- Acquisition of Language Resources 
- Corpora 
- Use of Machine Learning Techniques 
- Multilingual / Mixed Language Applications 
- Information Retrieval and Extraction 

Program Committee

 Michael Rosner, University of Malta, Malta (co-chair), mike.rosnerum.edu.mt 
 Shuly Wintner, University of Haifa, Israel (co-chair), shulycs.haifa.ac.il 
 Ken Beesley, XRCE, France, ken.beesleyxrce.xerox.com
 Achraf Chalabi, SAKHR Software, Cairo, Egypt, acsakhr.com 
 Yaacov Choueka, Bar Ilan University, Israel, yco636scnetvision.net.il 
 Anne De Roeck, Open University, UK, A.DeRoeckopen.ac.uk 
 Martha Evens, Illinois Institute of Technology, US, evensiit.edu 
 Ray Fabri, University of Malta, Malta, rfab1um.edu.mt 
 Salem Ghazali, IRSIT, Tunisia, ghazaliirsit.rnrt.tn 
 Alon Itai, The Technion, Haifa, Israel, itaics.technion.ac.il 
 Steven Krauwer, University of Utrecht, Netherlands, steven.krauwerlet.uu.nl 
 Mounira Loughraieb, University of Nancy 2, France, 
 mounira.loughraiebclsh.univ-nancy2.fr 
 Chadia Moghrabi, University of Moncton, mogracumoncton.ca 
 Mustafa Yaseen, Amman University, Jordan, myaseencbj.gov.jo 
 Remi Zajac, New Mexico State University, US, rzajaccrl.nmsu.edu 
 Adnane Zribi, University of Tunis, Tunisia, adngnet.tn 

Important dates

 February 24, 2002: Deadline for submissions 
 April 7, 2002: Notification of acceptance 
 May 1, 2002: Final version due 
 July 11, 2002: Workshop date 

Home Page and Further Details

 http://www.cs.um.edu.mt/~mros/WSL

 Workshop on
 Morphological and Phonological Learning

 Philadelphia, PA
 12 July 2001

 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

o Evaluation/comparison of morphology learning technologies

o Adapting and reusing grammars and lexicons among related languages

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

o Theoretical results on learnability or representation






 Program Committee

o Mike Maxwell (Linguistic Data Consortium, chair)
o Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, SIGNLL)
o Jason Eisner (Johns Hopkins University)
o Steven Bird (University of Pennsylvania)
o Lauri Karttunen (Parc Inc.)
o John A. Goldsmith (University of Chicago)

Invited Speaker: David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins University




 Submission Format and Instructions

Submissions must be in English, and should be full-length papers, up
to a maximum of 10 pages. (The final version in the proceedings should
incorporate reviewers' suggestions and may be up to 12 pages.) Except
for length, papers should adhere to the two-column format prescribed
by ACL'2002 Please see http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/acl02/style/
for the detailed guidelines.

Submissions should be sent electronically in Word, PDF or ASCII text
format to arrive no later than April 15, 2002 to Mike Maxwell
(maxwellldc.upenn.edu). The body of the email should give title,
author(s), abstract, and contact information. The subject line should
be "Morphology/ Phonology Learning Workshop."

The workshop papers will be published in both electronic and hard-copy
form.

While electronic submission is strongly preferred, if for some reason
you are not able to submit electronically, contact Mike Maxwell
concerning hard-copy submission.

Completed work is preferable to intended work, but in any event the
paper should clearly indicate the state of completion of the reported
results. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their
relevance, innovation, quality, and presentation according to the
schedule below. The program chair may invite additional reviewers as
necessary to obtain relevant expertise and avoid conflicts of
interest.

Authors will be expected to archive their final papers in the
Computation and Language section of arXiv.org, and to submit pointers
to the archived paper when submitting their camera-ready copy.



 Schedule

o Submission Deadline: 5 April 2002
o Notification: 25 April 2002
o Camera-ready Copy Due: 21 May 2002
o Workshop: 12 July 2002