LINGUIST List 14.1063

Wed Apr 9 2003

Calls: General Ling/TX USA; Computational Ling/Japan

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

Directory

1. kdegarcia, 32st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest
2. Steven Krauwer, ELSNET/ENABLER Resources Infrastructure Workshop at ACL2003

32st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 
Short Title: LASSO 32

Date: 17-OCT-03 - 19-OCT-03
Location: Edinburg, Texas, United States of America
Contact: Pamela L. Anderson-Mejas
Contact Email: pla66f5panam.edu 

Linguistic Sub-field: General Linguistics 
Call Deadline: 01-Jun-2003

Meeting Description:

The 32st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest
will be hosted by the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA), located
in the subtropical Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas from Friday,
October 17 to Sunday, October 19, 2003. This year's theme is
''Crossing Linguistic Borders.'' (Papers in all areas of linguistics
will be accepted, as usual). The Plenary Speakers will be Joshua
A. Fishman, Professor Emeritus from Yeshiva University, General Editor
of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and author
of numerous works, who will speak on ''Distancing and Interaction: The
Status Agenda in Corpus Planning'' and Jos G. Moreno de Alba,
research fellow of the Instituto de Investigaciones Filolgicas and
professor at Universidad Nacional Aut�noma de M�xico, and author of
numerous books on Spanish in the Americas, whose topic is ''El Atlas
Ling��stico de M�xico.'' Peter Gingiss, from the University of
Houston, will deliver the Presidential Address.

The conference will be held on the campus of UTPA in the University
Library. Edinburg, in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, is central to
several areas of interest. These include the resort areas of South
Padre Island, usually very nice in October, and Mexican border towns,
such as where Reynosa, shopping and restaurants abound. Monterrey,
Mexico is only three hours driving from Edinburg, for those interested
in more than the border region. In addition, there are abundant
opportunities for hunting and fishing; ecotourism is also a big draw
as the LRGV hosts approximately 500 species of birds. October is also
the month to view numerous butterflies in the Texas Butterfly Festival
in Mission (next door to Edinburg). This area of the U.S. is among
the fastest growing suburban-metropolitan areas of the country. 

250-500 word abstracts for proposals for papers, special sessions,
panels, or other program features should be submitted by e-mail to:
ellyvangelderenasu.edu or by regular mail: Dr. Elly vanGelderen,
Arizona State University, English Department,Tempe, AZ 85287-0302,
USA. Deadline for abstracts is June 1. For more information on the
submission of abstracts, visit
http://www7.tamu-commerce.edu/swjl/public_html/admin/call03.html.

 ACL2003 Resources Information Infrastructure Workshop
 _________________________________________________________________

 Last CALL for PAPERS

 Towards a Resources Information Infrastructure

 Workshop at ACL2003 in Sapporo (Japan)

 July 11 and 12 2003

 Organised by ENABLER / ELSNET

Description

 The problem addressed by this workshop is the well-known information
 problem. People are creating, exploring and exploiting language
 resources all over the world. Those who are working with resources
 know a lot about their own and other resources, and they are generally
 prepared to share this knowledge, their expertise and in many cases
 even their resources with others via publications in journals,
 presentations at conferences, and via the web.

 Unfortunately this information, however public, is not accessible in
 any systematic way for those who need resources, who want to know what
 sort of resources exist, how resources should be annotated, which
 standards to adhere to, which tools to use, etc etc. We will call this
 problem the 'Resources Information Problem'.

 The problem has also a geographical dimension: As work on specific
 languages is very often concentrated in specific parts of the world,
 much relevant information has a tendency to stay in one geographical
 place. This is an obstacle for those who are working on these same
 languages in different parts of the world, and it makes it harder to
 port knowledge and expertise gained on one language to other
 languages.

 The above observation are far from novel, and it would be naive to
 think that the problems will ever go away. At the same time one can
 observe that there are organisations (associations, agencies,
 projects, networks, etc) that have access to parts or fragments of
 this information and that have their own infrastructures that
 facilitate access to this information by internal or external people.

 The purpose of this workshop is to investigate how we can exploit the
 existing infrastructures to a maximum in order to facilitate
 world-wide access to information on language resources. The role of
 the workshop will be to bootstrap this process.

Approach

 * First of all we will try to make an initial map of the language
 resources landscape world-wide. This map will include actors,
 organisations, repositories, standards, projects, tool libraries,
 etc etc. All participants will be asked beforehand to submit
 pointers to such items. They will be collected and published.
 * At the workshop we will invite representatives of a number of
 organisations that can be seen as key actors in the field, and
 they will be asked to present ideas about the way their
 organisation could contribute to solving the Resources Information
 Problem. These ideas could range from very concrete and
 immediately implementable proposals to longer term and visionary
 actions.
 * A round table discussion at the workshop will aim at the creation
 of convergence, coherence and synergies between the proposed
 actions. The intended output is a catalogue of actions to
 facilitate access to resources information that could be
 implemented (almost) immediately, a skeleton plan for longer term
 actions, and firm commitment from key players to make these things
 happen.

Target audience

 Representatives of parties that could play a key role in providing
 access to resources information, such as (but not limited to)
 * Resources distribution agencies, e.g. LDC and ELDA/ELRA
 * Professional organisations, e.g. ACL, ISCA, and their regional
 branches, e.g. EACL, AACL, JACL, Asian NLP federation
 * Networks and resources infrastructure projects, e.g. ENABLER,
 ISLE. ELSNET
 * Committees, e.g. ICWLR, COCOSDA
 * National resources or infrastructure projects, e.g. Technolangue,
 Collate
 * International actions, e.g. OLAC
 * Researchers and developers interested in improving the
 language resources infrastructure for our community

Invited and submitted papers

 We expect to invite some 15 representatives to give their
 presentations, but in addition we are issuing an open call for papers
 addressing the resources information problem and possible solutions.
 These papers will be reviewed in the usual way.

Submission format

 Please submit full papers of maximum 8 pages (including references,
 figures etc). Authors should follow the main conference ACL style
 format. Electronic submission only. Send the pdf, postscript, or MS
 Word form of your submission to: Steven Krauwer
 (steven.krauwerelsnet.org) who will also answer any queries regarding
 the submission.

Important Dates

 Submission deadline for workshop papers: 13 April 2003
 Notification of accepted papers: 14 May 2003
 Deadline for camera ready copies 29 May 2003
 Workshop dates: 11-12 July 2003

Workshop Format

 It will be a two-day workshop, with invited and submitted
 presentations in the mornings, and topical panels and round
 table discussion in the afternoons, including an open meeting of
 the newly created International Coordination Committee for
 Written Language Resources.

Programme Committee

 As this workshop is jointly organized by ELSNET and ENABLER (two EU
 funded projects aimed at providing collaboration infrastructures), we
 have invited all ca 60 members of the ELSNET and ENABLER Boards to
 constitute the core programme committee. We may want to invite
 additional members from Asia and other parts of the world in order to
 ensure sufficient geographical coverage.

 A full list of PC members will be published on the workshop
 website at http://www.elsnet.org/acl2003-workshop


 The workshop will be jointly chaired by Steven Krauwer (ELSNET) and
 Nicoletta Calzolari/Antonio Zampolli (ENABLER)

Historical note

 This workshop can be seen as a follow-up of the workshop organised at
 ACL2000 in Hong Kong, entitled 'Towards infrastructures for global
 collaboration'. One of the conclusions of this workshop was that the
 field of language resources would offer good opportunities for
 collaborative actions, and the first concrete goal was the creation of
 an international resources federation, a first step towards which is
 now embodied by the proposal to set up an International Committee for
 Written Language Resources.

 The workshop should lead to the definition of concrete
 actions to be carried out under the auspices of ICWLR, in
 collaboration with other organisations.

Contact info

 Steven Krauwer (steven.krauwerelsnet.org), 
 ELSNET (http://www.elsnet.org)