LINGUIST List 15.2213

Tue Aug 3 2004

Calls: Phonology/Germany; Computational Ling/Germany

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

Directory

1. silke, Workshop ''Speech perception within or outside phonology?''
2. kuebler, 3rd Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories

Workshop ''Speech perception within or outside phonology?'' 

Date: 23-Feb-2005 - 25-Feb-2005
Location: Cologne, Germany
Contact: Silke Hamann
Contact Email: silkezas.gwz-berlin.de 
Meeting URL: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/events/percphon/ 

Linguistic Sub-field: Phonology 
Call Deadline: 15-Sep-2004 

Meeting Description:

Workshop on the question whether speech perception is extragrammatical
or inextricably woven into phonology. Part of the 27th annual meeting
of the German Society for Linguistics (DGfS). Organized by Paul
Boersma (University of Amsterdam) and Silke Hamann (ZAS, Berlin).

Cognitive psychologists define perception as the mapping from raw
sensory data to abstract mental representations. Correspondingly,
phoneticians and psycholinguists define speech perception as the
mapping from continuous auditory features to discrete phonological
representations. Speech perception researchers consistently find that
this mapping is language-specific for all normally developing
speakers/listeners from about nine months of age. Because of this
language-specificity some linguists have tried to model perception
with linguistic methods, which in phonology almost automatically means
that they have tried to model perception within the framework of
Optimality Theory. The earliest examples are Tesar (1997 et seq) and
Tesar & Smolensky�(1998 et seq), who modelled the mapping from overt
stress patterns to abstract metrical structure, and Boersma (1997 et
seq), who modelled the mapping from continuous F1 values to discrete
vowel height categories.

Since Tesar and Boersma's proposals involve an explicit
Optimality-Theoretic modelling of both the listener's comprehension
(i.e. perception and recognition) and the speaker's production, it is
not surprising that several authors who acknowledge the influence of
perception on phonology stay with the less elaborate original notion
of Optimality Theory in which the grammar has to model production
only. These authors thus tend to propose (or assume) that speech
perception resides outside phonology. The earliest example is Steriade
(1995 et seq.), who introduces an extra-phonological perceptibility
map to explain relative rankings of faithfulness constraints in
production.

Since there has been little or no open discussion about the relative
merits and the implications of the two competing views, this workshop
invites researchers from all phonological subfields to bring empirical
and theoretical evidence to bear on the issue: does perception inform
the grammar from outside, or is perception inextricably woven into the
grammar?

Invited speakers are Donca Steriade (MIT) and Paul Smolensky (Johns
Hopkins).

Presentations will be either 40 minutes plus 20 minutes discussion or
20 plus 10 minutes.

3rd Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories 
Short Title: TLT 2004 

Date: 10-Dec-2004 - 11-Dec-2004
Location: T�bingen, Germany
Contact: Sandra K�bler
Contact Email: tlt04sfs.uni-tuebingen.de 
Meeting URL: 

Linguistic Sub-field: Computational Linguistics, General Linguistics,
Linguistic Theories 
Call Deadline: 22-Aug-2004

Meeting Description:

Treebanks are a language resource that provides annotations of natural
languages at various levels of structure: at the word level, the
phrase level, the sentence level, and sometimes also at the level of
function-argument structure. Treebanks have become crucially important
for the development of data-driven approaches to natural language
processing, human language technologies, grammar extraction and
linguistic research in general. This series of workshops aims at being
a forum for researchers and advanced students working in these areas.

 The Third Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 2004)

	 T�bingen, Germany, 10-11 December 2004



			 SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS


	******************* DEADLINE EXTENSION ******************* 


 
Workshop motivation and aims

Treebanks are a language resource that provides annotations of natural
languages at various levels of structure: at the word level, the
phrase level, the sentence level, and sometimes also at the level of
function-argument structure. Treebanks have become crucially important
for the development of data-driven approaches to natural language
processing, human language technologies, grammar extraction and
linguistic research in general. There are a number of on-going
projects on the compilation of representative treebanks for languages
that still lack them (e.g. Bulgarian, Danish, Portugese, Spanish,
Turkish) and a number of on-going projects on the compilation of
treebanks for specific purposes for languages that already have them
(e.g. English). In addition, there are projects that go beyond
syntactic analysis to include different kinds of semantic and
pragmatic annotation.

The practices of building syntactically processed corpora have proved
that aiming at more detailed description of the data becomes more and
more theory-dependent (Prague Dependency Treebank and other
dependency-based treebanks such as the Danish dependendency treebank,
the Italian treebank (TUT), and the Turkish treebank (METU); Verbmobil
HPSG Treebanks, Polish HPSG Treebank, Bulgarian HPSG-based Treebank,
etc.). Therefore the development of treebanks and formal linguistic
theories need to be more tightly connected in order to ensure the
necessary information flow between them.

This series of workshops aims at being a forum for researchers and
advanced students working in these areas. The third workshop will be
held in T�bingen, Germany, 10-11 December 2004. (The first one was
held in Sozopol, Bulgaria in September 2002
(http://www.bultreebank.org/Proceedings.html), the second one in
V�xj�, Sweden in November 2003 (http://w3.msi.vxu.se/~rics/TLT2003/).


Topics of interest

We invite submission of papers on topics relevant to treebanks and
linguistic theories, including but not limited to:

 * design principles and annotation schemes for treebanks;
 * applications of treebanks in acquiring linguistic knowledge and NLP;
 * the role of linguistic theories in treebank development;
 * treebanks as a basis for linguistic research;
 * semantically annotated treebanks;
 * evaluation of treebanks;
 * tools for creation and management of treebanks;
 * standards for treebanks.


Important dates

Deadline for workshop abstract submission
22 August 2004

Notification of acceptance
1 October 2004

Final version of paper for workshop proceedings
1 November 2004

Workshop
10-11 December 2004


Submissions

We invite extended abstracts (maximum 1500 words) describing existing
research connected to the topics of the workshop. Please note that as
reviewing will be blind, the abstract should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity, e.g., ''We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...'',
should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as ''Smith previously
showed (Smith, 1991) ...''. Electronic submission (ps or pdf) is
strongly encouraged.

Each submission should additionally include in the accompanying email:
title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address,
postal address, telephone and fax numbers.

Abstracts should be sent to: tlt04sfs.uni-tuebingen.de


The presentation at the workshop will be 25 minutes long (20 minutes
for presentation and 5 minutes for questions and discussion). The
final version of the accepted papers may not exceed 12 A4 pages.


Invited speakers

Fred Karlsson (University of Helsinki) Collin Baker or Charles
Fillmore (International Computer Science Institute)(TBC)


Program committee

Emily Bender, USA
Thorsten Brants, USA
Koenraad de Smedt, Norway
Eva Ejerhed, Sweden
Tomaz Erjavec, Slovenia
Anette Frank, Germany
Jan Hajic, Czech Republic
Erhard Hinrichs, Germany
Kimmo Koskenniemi, Finland
Tony Kroch, USA
Matthias Trautner Kromann, Denmark
Sandra K�bler, Germany (co-chair)
Yuji Matsumoto, Japan
Detmar Meurers, USA
Joakim Nivre, Sweden (co-chair)
Karel Oliva, Austria, Czech Republic
Petya Osenova, Bulgaria
Beatrice Santorini, USA
Kiril Simov, Bulgaria
Martin Volk, Sweden


Sponsoring organisations

 * Nordic Treebank Network (Nordic Language Technology Program 020528)
 * Special Resarch Program ''Linguistic Data Structures'' (SFB 441) at the 
 University of T�bingen