LINGUIST List 14.3251

Tue Nov 25 2003

Calls: General Ling/UK; Computational Ling/France

Editor for this issue: Andrea Berez <andrealinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. jordan.zlatev, Language, Culture and Mind
2. Nicola.Cancedda, PASCAL Workshop on Text Mining and Understanding

Language, Culture and Mind 

Date: 17-Jul-2004 - 20-Jul-2004
Location: Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Contact: Jordan Zlatev
Contact Email: jordan.zlatevling.lu.se 
Meeting URL: http://www.unifr.ch/gefi/GP2/Portsmouth/ 

Linguistic Sub-field: General Linguistics
Call Deadline: 15-Jan-2004 

Meeting Description:

Second call for papers

International Conference on 

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND MIND
Integrating perspectives and methodologies in the study of language 

17-20 July 2004 
University of Portsmouth, England 

http://www.unifr.ch/gefi/GP2/Portsmouth/ 

THEME
Human natural languages are biologically based, cognitively motivated,
affectively rich, socially shared, grammatically organized symbolic
systems. They provide the principal semiotic means for the complexity
and diversity of human cultural life. As has long been recognized, no
single discipline or methodology is sufficient to capture all the
dimensions of this complex and multifaceted phenomenon, which lies at
the heart of what it is to be human. The goal of this conference is to
contribute to situating the study of language in a contemporary
interdisciplinary dialogue. Many of the relevant disciplines have made
highly significant theoretical, methodological and empirical advances
during the last decade.

We call for contributions from scholars and scientists in
anthropology, biology, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, semiotics,
cognitive and neurosciences, who wish both to impart their insights
and findings, and learn from other disciplines. Preference will be
given to submissions which emphasize interdisciplinarity, the
interaction between culture, mind and language, and/or
multi-methodological approaches in language sciences.

TOPICS
Topics include but are not limited to: 
 Biological and cultural co-evolution 
 Comparative study of communication systems 
 Cognitive and cultural schematization in language 
 Emergence of language in ontogeny and phylogeny 
 Language in multi-modal communication 
 Language and normativity 
 Language and thought, emotion and consciousness 

COMMITTEES

Local Organizing Committee (Department of Psychology, University of
Portsmouth, England)
* Mike Fluck 
* Karl Nunkoosing 
* Vasu Reddy 
* Chris Sinha 
* Vera da Silva 
* Joerg Zinken 

International Organizing Committee 
* Carmen Guarddon Anelo, Departamento de Filologias Extranjeras y sus
Lingisticas, Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, Spain
* Raphael Berthele, Departement f�r Germanistik, Universit� de
Fribourg, Switzerland
* Maria Crist�bal, Department of English Philology I. Universidad
Complutense de Madrid, Spain
* Iraide Ibarretxe, Department of English Philology, University of
Deusto / Department of Basque Philology, University of the Basque
Country, Spain
* Jordan Zlatev, Department of Linguistics Lund University /
Department of Philosophy and Linguistics, Ume� University; Sweden

International Scientific Committee
* Enrique Bern�rdez, Department of English Philology I, Universidad
Complutense de Madrid
* Gisela Bruche-Schultz, Department of English Language and
Literature, Free University of Berlin
* Seana Coulson, Department of Cognitive Science, UCSD
* Vyv Evans, Department of Linguistics and English, University of
Sussex
* Roslyn Frank, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of
Iowa
* Peter G�rdenfors, Lund University Cognitive Science (LUCS)
* Dirk Geeraerts, Department of Linguistics, Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven
* Tom Giv�n, Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon
* Pier Paolo Giglioli, DSC, Universit� di Bologna 
* Colette Grinevald, PR1, Universit� Lumi�re Lyon2
* Gisela H�kansson, Department of Linguistics, Lund University
* Peter Harder, Department of English, University of Copenhagen
* Esa Itkonen, Department of Linguistics, Turku University
* Sotaro Kita, Department of Psychology, University of Bristol
* Sydney Lamb, Department of Linguistics, Rice University
* Jean Lassegue, Laboratoire LaTTICe-CNRS, Ecole Normale Sup�rieure
* Brian MacWhinney, Department of Psychology, CMU
* Rukmini Nair, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
* Gary Palmer, Anthropology and Ethnic Studies, University of Nevada
* Gunter Senft, Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
* Augusto Soares da Silva, Faculdade de Filosofia de Braga,
Universidade Catolica Portuguesa
* Dan Slobin, Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley
* G�ran Sonesson, Department of Semiotics, Lund University
* Victor Rosenthal, INSERM, Paris
* Yves-Marie Visetti, Laboratoire LaTTICe-CNRS, Ecole Normale
Sup�rieure

SUBMISSION
Abstracts for 30-minute presentations should be submitted by January
15, 2004. Notification of acceptance by March 15, 2004. All abstracts
will be reviewed by members of the International Scientific Committee.

Each abstract should conform to the following specifications: 
Length: a single page of A4, single-spaced, font size 12pt or larger,
with 2.5cm margins on all sides. Any diagrams must fit on this single
page.

Head material (at the top of the single A4 page):
- Title of the paper,
- Author name(s),
- Author affiliation(s) in brief (1 line),
- Email address of principal author

Method: Abstracts should be emailed to jordan.zlatevling.lu.se as an
ATTACHMENT (i.e. not included in the message) preferably as a MS Word
document, but in PDF or postscript format if it is necessary to
include a diagram or figure.

REGISTRATION
The homesite of the conference
http://www.unifr.ch/gefi/GP2/Portsmouth/ will shortly be updated to
carry registration and accommodation information and instructions.

SATELLITE EVENTS
There will be an opportunity to organize workshops, seminars and other
satellite events on themes related to that of the
conference. Prospective organizers should contact
joerg.zinkenport.ac.uk

PASCAL Workshop on Text Mining and Understanding 

Date: 26-Jan-2004 - 29-Jan-2004
Location: Grenoble, France
Contact: Nicola Cancedda
Contact Email: Nicola.Canceddaxrce.xerox.com 

Linguistic Sub-field: Computational Linguistics 
Call Deadline: 05-Dec-2003

Meeting Description:

PASCAL Workshop on Learning Methods for Text Understanding and Mining

January 26-29, 2004
Grenoble (France)

PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational
Learning) is the name of a Network of Excellence sponsored by the
European Union as part of its IST program. It brings together experts
from basic research areas such as Statistics, Optimisation and
Computational Learning and from a number of application areas, with
the objective of integrating research agendas and improving the state
of the art in all concerned fields.

As part of its activities, the PASCAL network organises a workshop on
the subject of ''Learning Methods for Text Understanding and
Mining''. The aim of the workshop is twofold:
- Introducing to experts in statistics, computational learning and
optimization problems issuing from text understanding and mining which
are both relevant and suitable to be tackled within their framework;
- Proposing ''challenges'' (i.e.: concrete benchmark tasks) that will
help measuring improvements in the state of the art.

********************************************************************
********** E X T E N D E D D E A D L I N E S *********************
********************************************************************

* * * C A L L F O R P A P E R S A N D C H A L L E N G E S * *
PASCAL Workshop on Learning Methods for Text Understanding and Mining

January 26-29, 2004
Grenoble (France)

Important facts:
- Abstract of scientific contributions, submission due: EXTENDED to
December 5, 2003
- Challenge proposals, submission due: EXTENDED to December 10, 2003

THE WORKSHOP
- ----------

In order to achieve these objectives, the Workshop will be organised
as follows:

- Jan 26 (afternoon only): Pre-workshop: Presentation of the results
of the EU IST project KerMIT (''Kernel Methods for Images and Text'',
http://www.euro-kermit.org ).

- Jan 27: Tutorials
 - Machine Learning applied to Text Analysis: Overview
 (E. Gaussier)
 - Memory-based Language Processing (W.Daelemans)
 - Text Mining (D.Mladenic and M.Grobelnik)
 - Kernel Methods for Natural Language Processing (J-M. Renders)

- Jan 28: Contributed scientific talks

- Jan 29: Challenge proposals and discussion

We anticipate that participants might attend only part of the
workshop.

SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS
- ----------------------

For the day of January 28, submissions of abstracts are invited in the
following areas of interest:

- Machine learning of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and
 translation models
- Learning approaches to Document Retrieval, Categorization,
 Filtering and Clustering
- Text mining
- Learning approaches leveraging document structure
- Machine Learning for Information Extraction
- Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning for Natural Language

Of special interest are contributions addressing linguistic components
less commonly made the object of Machine Learning approaches (e.g.:
compositional semantics), as well as contributions addressing the
simultaneous learning of multiple linguistic components.

In order to foster fruitful discussions and eventually collaborations
between the scientific communities represented at the workshop,
scientific contributions should, whenever possible, emphasize the
limits of the approaches described, and explicitely mention what
difficult and important problems remain to be solved, if any.

Selected presentations will be allocated slots of 30
minutes. Presentation abstracts should be up to 4 pages long, in PDF
or PS format, and suitable to be printed on A4 paper. They should be
sent by e-mail to Nicola Cancedda at the address:

Nicola.Canceddaxrce.xerox.com

CHALLENGES
- --------

For the day of January 29, we invite submissions of proposals for
PASCAL challenges. The selected proposals will be presented in slots
of 30 minutes each in the morning, and will serve as a basis for the
discussion that will be held in the afternoon. Besides a description
of the problem to be solved, proposals should explicitely address:
- Format of the evaluation (TREC-like contrastive evaluation,
permanent web-based evaluation tool, ...);
- Public availability of data and other required resources;
- Estimated effort to build up resources, if any, not currently in
the public domain;
- Results already obtained on the data (if any);
- Key-words
We anticipate that some funding will be available from the PASCAL
budget to cover part of the expenses incurred in actually running
challenges.

The PASCAL joint programme of activities also envisages the definition
of theoretical challenges. We thus also invite submissions of
theoretical questions and open problems relevant to the application of
statistical learning and optimisation to problems in Natural Language
Processing, Information Retrieval and Textual Information Access. Such
proposals should provide, besides the question itself, a justification
of its relevance and a concise overview of related available relevant
results.

As for scientific contributions, proposals concerning tasks less
commonly addressed with Machine Learning techniques will receive
special consideration.

Challenge proposals should be up to 4 pages long, in PDF or PS format,
and suitable to be printed on A4 paper. They should be sent by e-mail
to Florence d'Alch�-Buc at the address:

florence.dalchelip6.fr

IMPORTANT DATES
- -------------
Please note the following deadlines:
- Abstracts of scientific presentations: EXTENDED to December 5,
 2003
- Challenge proposals: EXTENDED December 10, 2003
- Notification of acceptance: December 23, 2003
- Paper camera-ready deadline: January 16, 2004
- Workshop date: January 26-29, 2004

SPONSORSHIP
- ---------
The workshop will be partly funded by a grant from the European
Network of Excellence ''PASCAL''.

ORGANIZERS
- --------
* Nicola Cancedda (Xerox Research Centre Europe)
 Nicola.Canceddaxrce.xerox.com
* Florence d'Alch�-Buc (LIP6, University of Paris 6)
 florence.dalchelip6.fr


PROGRAMME COMMITTE
- ----------------

* Nicola Cancedda (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Alexander Clark (ISSCO/ETI, University of Geneva, Switzerland)
* Florence d'Alch�-Buc (LIP6, University of Paris 6, France)
* Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
* Ido Dagan (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
* Eric Gaussier (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Cyril Goutte (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)
* Marko Grobelnik (Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
* Dunja Mladenic (Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
* Jean-Michel Renders (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France)