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hum.hv.se>Call for papers March 1997 The major varieties of English (MAVEN) British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand An international conference at Vaxjo University College 20-22 November 1997 English is used by a constantly growing number of people all over the world, and several varieties, different Englishes, have been identified. However, only a limited number of regional varieties of English serve as models for learners in other parts of the world. The most important of these are usually considered to be the British, American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand varieties. The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars who are studying the development of these varieties, and in particular their interrelationships. The question of how, and to what extent, British and American English differ is an ever intriguing one for European learners. How strong is the influence of American vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation on British English? Is there also a current going the other way? Where does Canadian English stand in relation to British and American? And what about the influences from Britain and America on the Englishes of Australia and New Zealand? The answers to questions such as these have an obvious bearing on language pedagogy as well as lexicography and language description in general, but also on research areas like language change and sociolinguistics. Papers are invited on all aspects of these major varieties of English =AD pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics. Reports on empirical investigations (studies based on electronic corpora, elicitation tests, text analysis, observation etc.) are particularly welcome. Scientific programme Keynote lecture: Jan Svartvik, Lund, Sweden Plenary lectures (so far): Janet Holmes, Wellington, New Zealand Christian Mair, Freiburg, Germany Peter Trudgill, Lausanne, Switzerland The organization of paper presentations will depend on the number of participants. Publication We plan to publish the conference proceedings. Social programme There will be a conference dinner in the campus castle (must be seen to be believed) and a herring party at (inside) a glassworks. Accommodation Accommodation will be in hotels in town at conference rates. There are frequent local buses between the town centre and the campus. Organizing committee Hans Lindquist, Hans.LindquistMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
crl.nmsu.edu>********************************************************************** Call for Submissions Please Distribute Widely ********************************************************************** IJCAI-97 Workshop on Ontologies and Multilingual NLP Nagoya, Japan, August 23-25, 1997 (Web page: <a ref="http://crl.nmsu.edu/Events/IJCAI/";> Workshop on Ontologies and Multilingual NLP</a>) Background ========== A number of ontology-related workshops have been held in the past years (e.g., 1993 in Padua, 1995 IJCAI, 1996 ECAI, 1997 AAAI Spring Symposium, etc.). However, none of them concentrated centrally on applications of world modeling to multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP). Ontologies for knowledge-based computing and especially for Natural Language Processing are steadily reaching a level of sophistication and size which make them increasingly useful to the resolution of problems in real-world NLP applications. The recent creation of an ad hoc ANSI working group on standardization of ontologies is an indication of the maturity of the field. More and more ontology-based systems are being built for multilingual applications (e.g., multilingual machine translation, multilingual information retrieval). However, most of the language-processing oriented ontologies that have been built so far have English or another language (e.g., Japanese or Spanish) as the basis (e.g., WordNet, EDR, Pangloss, etc.). Since there is a growing need for multilingual applications of these ontologies, it is natural to ask the following questions: Are any of these ontologies actually used in a multilingual setting? Can we characterize the degree of independence of an ontology from the natural language it is based on? What are the necessary properties of a truly multilingual (or universal) ontology? Is it possible to obtain a language-neutral ontology from a language-dependent ontology? What applications truly need multilingual (or language-neutral) ontologies? How do we separate language-specific (or lexical) information from ontological knowledge? How can the depth of knowledge in the ontology be balanced with the needs of an application? What are the prospects of automating ontology acquisition? What is the relationship between an ontology as the repository of general knowledge about the world and knowledge about particular individuals - people, places, organizations, events, etc.? These and many more questions must be discussed much more widely than they have been till now. Many of the previous workshops were devoted to more formal issues in ontology building, such as the knowledge representation schemata, closures, formal properties of ontologies, and so on. Moreover, they included the discussion of small ontologies that cover a very narrow domain of problem solving; NLP typically requires a broad-coverage ontology. The hypothesis of using interlingual representations based on an ontology is at least 50 years old. It was originally formulated in the framework of machine translation. However, few systems to date have tested this hypothesis, for MT or other applications, by implementing a large-scale interlingua-based system using a language-independent ontology. This workshop will debate the benefits, costs and competitiveness of such an approach to solving semantic and cross-language problems for MT, IR, and other NLP applications. Audience ======== The workshop is open to all members of the AI and NLP community. The workshop is intended for researchers and practitioners in knowledge-based NLP, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics who have been working on large scale knowledge-based resources, ontologies, multilingual lexical semantics, interlinguas, and their applications. Reports of actual work including problems and solutions in the design, construction and use of ontologies are strongly encouraged but more theoretical work (grounded on actual work on ontologies) aimed at defining the limits, constraints and directions for large-scale practical language-neutral ontologies is welcome as well. Issues ====== Issues to be addressed include but are not limited to: - Design of language-neutral ontologies. - Acquisition problems in multilingual ontologies. - Multilingual applications of ontologies. - Multilingual ontologies and terminological knowledge bases. - Ontologies and interlinguas. - Standardization of ontologies: issues of multilinguality. - Ontologies and Lexicons. - Sharing and standardization of language-independent ontologies for NLP. - Costs and competitiveness of ontology-based solutions vis-a-vis corpus-based and transfer-based methods for multilingual NLP. Format of the Workshop ====================== The workshop will include twelve presentation periods which will be divided into ten-minute presentations of positions followed by 20-minute discussions. The attendance will be limited to 20 active participants. Papers will be circulated among participants several weeks before the workshop. Presentation will be short, under 15 minutes (10 minutes preferably) with 20 minutes reserved for exchanges. We encourage the authors to focus on the salient points of their presentation and identify possible controversial positions. We encourage authors not to repeat as is what has been already written in the paper. There will be ample time set aside for informal and panel discussions and audience participation. Please note that workshop participants are required to register at the main IJCAI-97 conference. Submission Information ====================== Timetable - ------- - March 15, 1997: Deadline for reception of submissions. - May 1, 1997: Notification of acceptance. - July 1, 1997: Deadline for reception of camera-ready copy. Format - ---- Submissions must not exceed 6 pages in camera-ready format. Submissions in electronic form are prefered. Authors should follow the IJCAI format. <http://www.ijcai.org/ijcai-97/CfX/cfp.html>; Review Process - ------------ Papers will be subject to peer review. Selection criteria include accuracy and originality of ideas, clarity and significance of results and the quality of the presentation. The decision of the Program Committee, taking into consideration the individual reviews, will be final and cannot be appealed. Papers selected will be scheduled for presentation. Authors of accepted papers, or their representatives, are expected to present their papers at the conference. Submission - -------- Electronic submission should be sent at zajacMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue