LINGUIST List 5.1143

Tue 18 Oct 1994

FYI: AAAS, Rightward movement, BibTex collection, Frequency

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Vicki Fromkin, aaas
2. , abstracts on rightward movement available
3. Oliver Christ, ANLP'94: BibTeX collection available
4. MARSHALL MYERS, Re: 5.1133 Sum: Word Frequency Lists

Preparations are underway to mark an historic event in 1998; the 150th
anniversary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The AAAS has played a fundamental role in shaping the formation of a
scientific community in the U.S. According to a statement by the AAAS
which was founded in 1848, the word "scientist" had been coined only
eight years earlier. ( I assume this is based on the fact that the first
source cited in OED is in 1840 which, of course does not mean that it
was the first use of the word.) The original 461 members of the AAAS
constituted nearly every prominent scientist at work in the nation at
that time. They envisioned an organization that would promote and
maintain a shared sense of pride among scientists of all disciplines as
well as advance and diffuse scientific knowledge. The 150th anniversary
of AAAS provides a unique opportunity to rededicate ourselves to
leadership in these areas within a scientific community that is now
global in scope and strength.

As part of these efforts, the AAAS has launched a campaign for a 1998
U.S. postage stamp commemorating not only AAAS but the last 150 years of
scientific achievement. The proposal will be submitted to the Citizen s
Stamp Advisory Committee soon after the February 1995 AAAS meeting in
Atlanta. Time is of the essence, as it takes at least three years to
move from a stamp s approval to its design and production. In order for
the proposal to be successful, the AAAS must show significant and
widespread public support.

As secretary of the newly formed Section Z - Linguistics and the
Language Sciences -- I am therefore calling on all linguists to support
this important effort. Please send letters of support, as well as any
suggestions for the stamp s theme and design to:
 AAAS Commemorative Stamp Committee
 Office of Communications, Room 801
 1333 H Street, N.W.
 Washington, D.C. 20005

You are also urged to send ideas for ways the AAAS might mark the
Association s 150th anniversary to:
Sesquicentennial Task Force
(same address as above).

The Tilburg Conference on Rightward Movement has now come and gone
and we find that we have a small number of collected abstracts left
over. Rather than simply discard them, we are making them available
on a first-come, first-served basis. Note that this is a collection
of the submitted abstracts selected for presentation and alternates,
a full precedings is expected in the future.

If you would like to receive a copy of this collection, send your
request (with full mailing address) to:

rghtwrdkub.nl

Again, there are a limited number of copies available, so only the
first 20 or so requests will be met.

A collection of BibTeX entries is available for all papers and posters included
in the proceedings of this year's ACL Conference on Applied NLP (Stuttgart,
13-15 October).

The collection can be downloaded by anonymous ftp from

 ftp.ims.uni-stuttgart.de:/pub/bib/anlp94.bib

 (URL ftp://ftp.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/bib/anlp94.bib)

Best regards,

 Oli

Oliver Christ
Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart, Germany
oliims.uni-stuttgart.de
>----------- WWW: http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/IMS.html ---------------<

Message 4: Re: 5.1133 Sum: Word Frequency Lists

It is not a data base, but by scanning it could become one: W. Nelson Francis
and Henry Kucera's FREQUENCY ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH USAGE is the famous Brown
corpus of 1 million words. It's thorough, could be used for comparison, and
widely respected. Houghton Mifflin published it in 1982.

Marshall Myers
Texas Tech