LINGUIST List 13.2850

Tue Nov 5 2002

Calls: Cognitive Ling/Natural Lang Processing

Editor for this issue: Karolina Owczarzak <karolinalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. mg246, Empirical Methods in Cognitive Linguistics Workshop
2. Diego Molla, Australasian Natural Lang Processing Workshop

Empirical Methods in Cognitive Linguistics Workshop

Short Title: EMCL
Location: Ithaca, New York, USA
Date: 02-May-2003 - 04-May-2003

Call Deadline: 31-Jan-2003

Web Site: http://cerebro.psych.cornell.edu/emcl
Contact Person: Monica Gonzalez-Marquez
Meeting Email: mg246cornell.edu
Linguistic Subfield(s): General Linguistics


Meeting Description: 

Empirical Methods in Cognitive Linguistics (EMCL) Workshop will be held at
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA
http://cerebro.psych.cornell.edu/emcl


Introduction:

Recent years have witnessed a virtual explosion of theory about the
relationship between language and cognition in work on cognitive
grammar (Langacker), cognitive semantics (Talmy), conceptual
integration (Fauconnier & Turner), and conceptual metaphor (Lakoff,
Sweetser). However, most of the empirical support for these theories
lies in the linguistic judgments and intuitions of their
proponents. While this is a powerful form of empirical support, the
wide-ranging nature of the claims in cognitive linguistics creates a
particular need for converging evidence from other techniques in
cognitive science in order to assess both its assumptions and its
conclusions about cognitive phenomena. The Empirical Methods in
Cognitive Linguistics Workshop is motivated by the idea that
experimental and observational work can help substantiate the claims
of cognitive linguistics, and to further develop an empirically valid
account of the connection between language and cognition.

This interdisciplinary workshop is intended to provide a forum where
people doing experimental and observational research in cognitive
linguistics can come together to obtain a comprehensive picture of
progress in this endeavor, and to identify areas for future
investigation. During the workshop, we will explore the use of various
experimental and observational methods to address particular issues
relevant to language and cognition.

To this end, the goals of the workshop are:

-to evaluate experimental and empirical support for various claims in
cognitive linguistics;
 
-to address practical and methodological issues such as experimental
design, data collection and analysis (including audio/video corpora,
eye-tracking, gesture, fMRI/EEG, image schemas, etc.)

-to explore how data from natural language corpora can be fruitfully
incorporated in experimental work;

-to create a network of researchers with common interests and concern
for continued collaboration.

Contact information:

Monica Gonzalez-Marquez -- mg246cornell.edu

http://cerebro.psych.cornell.edu/emcl
Application deadline: January 31, 2003
Notification of acceptance by: March 15, 2003

This event is sponsored and generously funded by the Cognitive Studies
Program at Cornell University.
				
Workshop format:

The weekend will kick off with a plenary lecture followed by a
question and answer session with the audience.Aside from this
initiating lecture, however, the event will be organized around
parallel workshop sessions of two types, those led by faculty members
and those organized around student presentations. All sessions are
intended to be highly interactive. In the first sort of workshop, a
faculty member will work with a small group of students to solve a
problem or set of problems that might arise in her area of
expertise. For example, in a workshop on the use of metaphor in
gesture, the group might jointly analyze a videotape of face-to-face
interaction. In a workshop on eye-tracking, the group might be asked
to analyze data collected from a single subject in a particular
experiment. In a workshop on behavioral measures, the group might
begin with a theoretical issue in cognitive linguistics and design an
experiment to test it. These workshops will be 'recycled' in that
each faculty member will hold the same workshop twice, so that most
participants will get a chance to participate in most workshops. In
the student-led sessions, graduate students will make 15-minute
presentations about their work, followed by extensive discussion about
the theoretical and methodological issues raised by the students'
research. The event will end with a roundtable discussion session in
which participants synthesize the contents of the workshop and talk
about future directions.

Graduate Students:

Participants will be graduate students undertaking
empirical/experimental work relevant to language and cognition.
Applicants should be familiar with current ideas in cognitive
linguistics and be prepared to critically discuss various aspects of
the theory. Participants will be expected to present their ongoing
research to the group for constructive feedback. Interested graduate
students are invited to submit their applications by following the
instructions given at the workshop website:

Accommodation will be provided for all accepted students. In addition,
it is likely that modest travel grants will be available to students
traveling long distances.

Faculty:

Seana Coulson (UCSD, Cognitive Science)	
Chris Sinha (University of Portsmouth, Developmental Psychology)
Michael J. Spivey (Cornell University, Psycholinguistics)

5 additional faculty members will be added over the course of the next
few weeks.

Organizing Committee:

Seana Coulson (UCSD, Cognitive Science)
Richard Dale	(Cornell, Psychology)
Monica Gonzalez-Marquez, Chair (Cornell, Psychology)
Irene Mittelberg (Cornell, Linguistics)
Michael J. Spivey (Cornell, Psycholinguistics)

 5th AUSTRALASIAN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING WORKSHOP
 (ANLP2002)

 Second Call for Participation

 2nd December 2002
 Canberra, Australia
 http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/Conferences/anlp2002


Macquarie University's Centre for Language Technology cordially
invites you to this one-day workshop on Natural Language Processing to
be held in conjunction with the Australian AI conference (AI'02) in
Canberra: http://www.cs.adfa.edu.au/~abbass/AI02/index.html

The goals of the workshop are:

 * to bring together the growing NLP community in Australia and New
 Zealand;
 * to provide an opportunity for the broader artificial intelligence
 community to become aware of local NLP research;
 * to provide a forum for discussion of new research;
 * to foster interaction between academic and industrial research.

Our hope is to get as many Australasian NLPers together as possible to
encourage dialogue between those working on similar topics and between
areas with a - perhaps as yet untapped - potential to interact.

PROGRAM

Below is the provisional program for the Workshop. The final details
will be given on-site.

8:30-9:00 Registration
9:00-9:15 Welcome

9:15-10:45 Inductive Approaches to NLP
 * Orthographic tries in language independent named entity
 recognition,
 Whitelaw,C., Patrick, J. , University of Sydney (AU)
 * Learning selectional preferences for use in resolving associative
 anaphora,
 Meyer, J. Dale, R., Macquarie University, Sydney (AU)
 * User driven example- based training for creating lexical
 knowledgebases,
 Patrick, J. Palko, D. Munro, R. Zappagina, M. , University of
 Sydney (AU)

10:45-11:00 Morning tea

11:00-12:00 Syntax and Semantics
 * Dependency-based semantic interpretation for answer extraction,
 Molla-Aliod, D., Macquarie University, Sydney (AU);
 Hutchinson, B., University of Edinburgh (UK)
 * Syntax and semantics for sentence processing in English and Maori,
 Bayard, I. Knott, A. Moorfield, J. , University of Otago (NZ)

12:00-13:30 Lunch

13:30-14:30 NLP Systems (I)
 * Generating more natural route descriptions,
 Dale, R. Geldof, S. Prost, J.-P., Macquarie University,
 Sydney (AU)
 * Text classification of formatted text documents,
 Carr, O. Estival, D. , DSTO, Adelaide (AU)

14:30-14:45 Afternoon tea

14:45-15:45 NLP Systems (II)
 * Developing a black box specification in controlled english,
 Schwitter, R., Macquarie University, Sydney (AU)
 * An architecture for bilingual and bi-directional NLP,
 Knott, A.Bayard, I. de Jager, S.Wright, N., University of
 Otago (NZ)

15:45-16:00 Wrap-up
16:30-17:00 ALTA business meeting

MORE INFORMATION

The ANLP2002 webpage will regularly be updated with useful information
about the workshop: http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/Conferences/anlp2002

You can contact the workshop organisers for further information:
anlp-infoics.mq.edu.au

- 

Diego Molla-Aliod
Sabine Geldof,
Workshop Chairs.