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nflc.org>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: aschwartMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
kub.nl>CALL FOR PAPERS CoNLL-2002 Sixth Conference on Natural Language Learning COLING-2002 workshop W11 Taipei, Taiwan, August 31 - September 1, 2002 http://www.aclweb.org/signll/cfp.html Background and Scope - ------------------ CoNLL is the yearly meeting organized by SIGNLL, the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning. Previous CoNLL meetings were held in Madrid (1997), Sydney (1998), Bergen (1999) Lisbon (2000) and Toulouse(2001). The 2002 event will be held as a two-days workshop at the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 24 August - September 1, 2002 in Taipei, Taiwan. CoNLL is organised in cooperation with SIGDAT. CoNLL is an international forum for discussion and presentation of research on natural language learning. We invite submission of papers about natural language learning topics, including, but not limited to: * Computational models of human language acquisition * Computational models of the origins and evolution of language * Learning from very large corpora * Machine learning methods applied to natural language processing tasks (speech processing, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse processing, language engineering applications) * Symbolic learning methods (Rule Induction and Decision Tree Learning, Lazy Learning, Inductive Logic Programming, Analytical Learning, Transformation-based Error-driven Learning) * Biologically-inspired methods (Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computing) * Statistical methods (Bayesian Learning, HMM, maximum entropy, SNoW, Support Vector Machines) * Reinforcement Learning * Active learning, ensemble methods, meta-learning * Computational Learning Theory analysis of language learning * Empirical and theoretical comparisons of language learning methods * Models of induction and analogy in Linguistics Special Theme - ----------- As in previous years, in addition to submissions on the general topics listed above, we encourage submissions on a special theme. This year's special theme is: Using unsupervised and semi-supervised learning methods in natural language learning Many machine learning approaches to natural language problems require supervision, typically in the form of labeled examples. Due to the difficulty annotating data, there has been a significant interest recently in the study of methods that can benefit from large amounts of unlabeled data, perhaps in addition to relatively small amounts of labeled examples. The purpose of the special theme is to present and discuss progress in this direction in the context of natural language learning and highlight both theoretical and experimental studies on a variety of approaches to these issues. Special Session: Shared Task - Named Entity Recognition - ----------------------------------------------------- This year's workshop will also accept submissions for a shared task: named entity recognition. Participating groups will be provided with the same training and testing material (in several languages), and will all use the same evaluation criteria, thus allowing comparison between various learning methods. More information on the shared task is available at: http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/conll2002/ner/ Invited Speaker - ------------- John Lafferty (School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA) Submissions - --------- Main Session Submissions Submit an abstract of maximum 1500 words (Postscript, PDF or plain text ASCII) by May 2nd, 2002 electronically to the address below. Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to produce a full paper to be published in the proceedings of the workshop, which will be available at the workshop for participants, and distributed afterwords by COLING. Final submissions must follow the COLING style (http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/coling2002/psg.html). We strongly recommend the use of these style files also in the submission. Submit main session abstracts to: Dan Roth, danrMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue