LINGUIST List 13.2322

Mon Sep 16 2002

Calls: Lang Engineering, Pragmatics/Indigenous Langs

Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Jason Eisner, JHU Summer Workshop on Language Engineering
2. Donna Patrick, Panel on Indigenous languages (IPrA)

CALL FOR RESEARCH PROPOSALS

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins
University invites research proposals for a Summer Workshop on Language
Engineering, to be held in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, from July 14 to
August 22, 2003.

The deadline for submitting proposals is October 15, 2002.

You may already have a good idea of the purpose of these six-week summer
workshops, which we have hosted every year since 1995. Each workshop
team (eight or more people) explores a specific research topic that will
help advance the state of the art, in some area of Language Engineering
such as

* Speech recognition
* Translingual information detection and extraction
* Machine translation
* Speech synthesis
* Information retrieval
* Topic detection and tracking
* Text summarization
* Question answering

The research topics of the participating teams in previous workshops can
serve as good examples (see http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops). Having
identified such topics through the review process described below, we
then attempt to get the best researchers to collaboratively work on
them. You may also have a good idea of the typical participants of
these summer workshops: the workshops bring together diverse teams of
leading researchers and students. The senior participants in the
workshop are university professors and industrial and governmental
researchers from widely dispersed locations. The graduate students are
familiar with the field and are selected in accordance with their
demonstrated performance, usually by the senior researchers. The
undergraduates, selected through a national search, are entering seniors
who are new to the field and who have shown outstanding academic
promise.

We are soliciting proposals for research projects from a wide range of
academic and government institutions, as well as from industry. An
independent panel of experts will screen all proposals received by the
deadline for suitability to the workshop goals and format. Results of
this screening will be announced no later than October 23,
2002. Proposals passing this initial screening will be presented to a
peer-review panel that will meet in Baltimore on November 8-10,
2002. One or two authors of the screened proposals and other leading
researchers will be invited to this meeting. It is expected that the
proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any outstanding
concerns or new ideas. Out of these panel reviews and ensuing
discussion, three research topics will finally be selected for the 2003
workshop. Authors of successful proposals will typically be the team
leaders.

Would you be interested and available to participate in the 2003 Summer
Workshop? If so, we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for
consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed and a rough work
agenda for the workshop. If your proposal passes the initial screening,
we will invite you to join us for the organizational meeting in
Baltimore (as our guest) for further discussions aimed at consensus. If
a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the three or four
to be pursued next summer, we expect you to be available for
participation in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an
ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good-faith understanding
that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will want to
have an active role in pursuing it.

Proposals may be faxed (410-516-5050), or sent via e-mail
(secclsp.jhu.edu) or regular mail (CLSP, Johns Hopkins University,
320 Barton Hall, 3400 N. Charles St., Barton 320, Baltimore, MD 21218).

Abstracts are invited for the 8th International Pragmatics Conference,
Toronto, Canada, 13-18 July 2003 to contribute to the panel "Indigenous
language stability and change." For more information, please contact
Donna Patrick at dpatrickspartan.ac.brocku.ca
For more details on the conference and paper submissions see
http://ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/

Abstracts for consideration in the panel need to be submitted by 15
October 2002 to Donna Patrick, Department of Applied Language Studies,
Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada L2S 3A1. They can be sent
electroncially to dpatrickspartan.ac.brocku.ca. Please state your full
name, address and email address in the message. You can also send
abstracts directly to the IPrA Secretariat by November 1, 2002.


Indigenous language stability and change: Multilingualism and political
autonomy

This colloquium will explore the issue of indigenous language stability
and change in multilingual contexts, where aboriginal languages are used
and valued alongside other languages used in the community. It will
examine indigenous communities that are concerned with the vitality and
'survival' of their own territory, language, and way of life but, at the
same time, are engaged in political, legal, and other campaigns that
require the use of 'modern' methods, including a dominant state
language. We will investigate how multilingual resources are used to
gain greater autonomy and control over local institutions, land, and
economic activities and the consequences of these language practices for
the 'survival' of indigenous languages. We welcome papers that explore
language practices in the paradoxical situations in which many
indigenous groups around the world find themselves: trying to protect
their rights and to maintain their cultural and linguistic practices,
but needing to master a dominant state language in order to engage in
the modern political processes necessary to achieve these goals.
Possible topics include the problems of implementing language rights in
multilingual communities and of standardizing languages in these
contexts, the notion of linguistic hybridity, and the role and value of
dominant state languages in minority settings.