LINGUIST List 14.363

Wed Feb 5 2003

Calls: Penn Ling Colloquium/NLP for Minority Lang

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

Directory

1. Penn Ling Colloquium, Penn Linguistics Colloquium, PA USA
2. ostreiter, NLP for Minority Languages, France

27th Penn Linguistics Colloquium

The 27th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium is scheduled for Friday
through Sunday, February 21 through 23, 2003 at the University of
Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia.

Keynote Lecture: 
A Compositional Characterization of the Definiteness Effect in
Existential-There Sentences 
Invited Speaker: Professor Edward Keenan of UCLA

Panel Discussion: 
Goffman's Legacy and Future Study of Language Interaction 
Discussants include: Deborah Shiffrin, William Labov

Our program includes sessions on language acquisition, syntax,
mathematical linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics,
phonology, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, as well as a Special Session
in formal semantics.

Schedule of talks and local information are available at the
conference website: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/

Online pre-registration form is available now and until February 15th
at 

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/registration/register.php 

The pre-registration fee is $20 (students $15), on-site registration
is $23 (students $18). Please pre-register! Early registration will
help us estimate the number of attendees, and help you avoid paying
extra $3 for on-site registration.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact us at one of the
following addresses:

The Penn Linguistics Colloquium Committee
Department of Linguistics
619 Williams Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
plc27ling.upenn.edu
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC


This event is supported by funding from GSAC, the Graduate Student
Association Council of University of Pennsylvania.

NLP for Minority Languages with Few Computational Linguistic Resources


Short Title: NLP Minority Languages
Location: Batz-sur-Mer, France
Date: 14-Jun-2003 - 14-Jun-2003 
Call Deadline: 19-Mar-2003

Web Site: http://dev.eurac.edu:8080/taln/workshop.minorities.txt
Contact Person: Oliver Streiter
Meeting Email: ostreitereurac.edu
Linguistic Subfield(s): Computational Linguistics 

This is a session of the following conference:
2003 Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles


Meeting Description: 

The goal of the workshop is to get an overview of activities,
methodologies and achievements in the area of Natural Language
Processing of Minority Languages. Workshop on Natural Language
Processing of Minority Languages with few computational linguistic
resources

BACKGROUND

Over the last few years, minority and small languages have attracted
considerable attention. Projects aiming at the revitalization,
standardization and linguistic normalization have been initiated to
promote usage of these languages and contribute to their
survival. Speakers of smaller languages have gained awareness that
their languages belong to the world's cultural heritage, and are
becoming more and more inclined to use their native tongues at a
broader scale. The rising number of web-pages in lesser-used languages
demonstrates this fact.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

This workshop will approach the problem of minority languages from the
computational point of view. The workshop will focus on minority
languages with few computational linguistic resources, e.g. Occitan,
Hakka, Corse, Nahuatl, including specific minority languages as sign
languages. Minority languages with rich computational linguistic
resources, as for example Catalan, are not excluded from the workshop
as they may function as an example of a successful minority
language. Papers related to majority languages are equally accepted in
case the languages treated face problems similar to minority
languages.

The goal of the workshop is to get an overview of activities,
methodologies and achievements in the area of Natural Language
Processing of Minority Languages, in order to promote the research in
this area and to enhance the prestige associated with this research.

Automatic processing of minority languages has to overcome a number of
difficulties which arise from their special status.

* As these languages have few speakers, there are few native linguists
and even fewer computational linguists. Rule-based approaches to
tagging, parsing, etc. may thus be difficult to apply.

* The scarce financial support that these languages enjoy equally
seems to virtually exclude rule-based approaches due to the amount of
human labor these approaches generally require. This problem might be
overcome if computational frameworks derived from other languages can
be adopted.

* Corpus-based approaches are only applicable if adequate corpora are
available. However, creation of a corpus is time- and money-consuming
and requires linguistically sound conceptions, especially if
general-purpose corpora are to be created.

* Example-based approaches seem to be more promising in this light if
no general-purpose corpora, but specific examples are
required. Compilation of special examples also seems to be easier to
implement than to write formal rules. However, little is known of the
feasibility of this paradigm with respect to minority languages.

* Shallow knowledge techniques may be developed or are already in use,
which benefit from a specific property of a language or a language
family. This however may hamper the transfer of the approach from one
language to other languages. Some techniques might work with analytic
languages and not with agglutinative languages, etc . Different
writing systems might also prevent one simple approach from being
applicable to another language. The workshop is expected to stimulate
research in this area. We invite papers which are concerned with, but
not restricted to, the following topics:.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

* the relation between NLP and minority language support in general,
* development of specific NLP applications for minority languages,
e.g. tagging, morphological analysis, parsing, information retrieval,
machine translation
* development of corpora and machine-readable dictionaries for minority
languages,
* presentation of shallow knowledge NLP techniques which could be applied
to minority languages,
* overview studies that describe the state of the art of NLP for the
minority languages of a country, a region or a language type,
* comparative analysis of different NLP approaches to different minority
languages and languages types,
* free resources for NLP, their application areas and limitations,
* the requirements for NLP applications for special minority language groups.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Shin-Hsi Chen National Taiwan University,
 hh_chencsie.ntu.edu.tw
Vitelio Herrera Union Latiner, Direction Terminologia et Industries
 de la Lange, Paris
 v.herreraunilat.org
Leonid Iomdin Academia Auk Moscow, Laboratory of Computer Linguistics
 iomdiniitp.ru
Harold Somers Centre for Computational Linguistics, UMIST
 Harold.Somersumist.ac.uk
Oliver Streiter EURAC, European Academy, Language & Law,
 ostreitereurac.edu
Mathias Stuflesser SPELL, Service de Personification y Elaboration Dal
 Lings Ladin,
 spell-mathiasladinia.net
Leonhard Voltmer EURAC, European Academy, Minorities,
 lvoltmereurac.edu
Wolfgang W�lck University at Buffalo, SUNNY,
 wwolckacsu.buffalo.edu

IMPORTANT DATES

19.3.2003 Submission deadline
31.3.2003 Notification of acceptance
28.4.2003 Camera ready version

SUBMISSION FORMAT

Submissions should not be longer than 10 pages in Times 12, all
included. For more detailed information in French see:

http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/page/taln_appel.html

Style files can be downloaded here.

Latex French: 
http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/doc/StyleLatexTaln03_FR.tgz
Latex English: 
http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/doc/StyleLatexTaln03_EN.tgz
Word French: 
http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/doc/ModeleTaln2003_FR.dot
Word English: 
http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/irin/taln2003/doc/ModeleTaln2003_EN.dot

CONTACT ADDRESS

The contact address for submissions to the workshop and
further informations with respect to the workshop is

Oliver Streiter
European Academy
Language and law
mail: ostreitereurac.edu
tel: +39 0471 055 115
fax: +39 0471 055 199