LINGUIST List 9.1481

Thu Oct 22 1998

Calls: Nominal Expressions, Language & Culture

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Rodger Kibble, Nominal Expressions
2. SALSA, Language and Culture

 First Announcement and Call For Papers
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


 ESSLLI-99 workshop on

 The Generation of Nominal Expressions

 University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
 9-13 August 1999


Context: 

The workshop will take place in association with the 11th 
European Summer School "Logic Linguistics and Information" 
(ESSLLI), to be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from 9-20 
August 1999. The format of the workshop is 5 x 90 minutes on 
the 5 consecutive days of 9 to 13 August 1999.

The ESSLLI Summer School is organized under the auspices of the 
European Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI).
Previous ESSLLI Summer Schools have been highly successful,
attracting around 500 students from Europe and elsewhere. The 
school has developed into an important meeting place and forum 
for discussion for students and researchers interested in the 
interdisciplinary study of Logic, Language and Information.
For more information see http://esslli.let.uu.nl. 


Workshop Description:

 If someone attempted to assess the `state of the art' of 
 linguistic research on nominal expressions by looking at 
 how present-day programs generate nominals, he or she would 
 no doubt underestimate gravely the level of sophistication 
 of theoretical work on nominals. It can be argued that this is 
 because existing work on the computational generation of nominals 
 has limited itself to relatively simple nominals, often focussing 
 on simple (singular) definite descriptions and pronouns.
 Alternatively, it might be contended that much of the theoretical 
 work in this area is not mature enough to be appicable in 
 generation. Be this as it may, work on the generation of nominals 
 has not profited much from theoretical research in formal semantics 
 and psycholinguistics on the meaning, interpretation and production 
 of nominal expressions. 

 This workshop will try to bridge the gap between theory and 
 practice in this area by focusing on the generation of nominal 
 expressions of different linguistic types including, for example, 
 indefinite and quantificational NPs (of different monotonicity 
 types). 

 The theme of the workshop is closely related to that of a number 
 of ongoing research projects, including the GNOME (`Generation of 
 NOMinal Expressions') project, in which the ITRI (Brighton) and 
 HCRC (Edinburgh/Durham) collaborate, and which is funded by the 
 EPSRC in the United Kingdom. 


 Topics for which submissions are invited include:

 (1) The influence of discourse context on the appropriateness
 and interpretation of a nominal expression
 (2) Descriptive issues concerning the treatment of plurality, 
 bridging, aggregation, eventualities, reference to text, 
 cross-modal reference, etc.
 (3) Representational issues (i.e., what kind of meaning
 representations should form the input to the generation 
 algorithm?)
 (4) Reversibility of grammars
 (5) Differences in textual style or `genre'
 (6) Psycholinguistic research relevant to computational 
 Natural Language Generation (NLG)
 (7) Corpus-based work leading to insights relevant for 
 computational NLG
 (8) Issues of system/algorithm evaluation.


Practical issues:

We welcome short (i.e., roughly 1000-1500 words) electronic 
submissions (send email to Rodger.Kibbleitri.brighton.ac.uk) 
on the theme of the workshop. Submissions should be in Postscript 
or plain ascii. Please include "ESSLLI99" in the Subject line of 
your message to make things easy for us.

In accordance with the description of the Workshop Description,
we encourage submissions about theoretical (e.g., formal semantic
or psycholinguistic), applied, or corpus-based work, as long as 
the work is clearly relevant for NLG programs. No matter what 
they consider the main focus of their work, we ask authors to 
*stress relevance for NLG* in their submission (and, later, in 
their presentation). This will ensure that all contributions will 
contain a common `core', notwithstanding their differences in 
perspective.

It is ESSLLI's practice to make sure that workshops go ahead only
if there turns out to be a sufficient level of interest, based on 
quantity and quality of submissions.

Workshop speakers are required to register for the Summer School; 
however, workshop speakers will be able to register at a reduced 
rate to be determined by the Organizing Committee. Limited funds 
are available to contribute to speakers' expenses in exceptional
circumstances.


Important dates:

- First call for papers: 22 October 1998
- Deadline for submissions of abstracts: 1 March 1999
- Notification of acceptance: 1 May 1999
- Workshop to be held: August 9-13


For any questions, please contact the organizers or
consult our web page at
<http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/projects/gnome/esslli99.html>; 
which will shortly be available.


Rodger Kibble & Kees van Deemter
Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) 
University of Brighton
Lewes Road, Watts Building 
Brighton BN2 4GJ
United Kingdom

Email: Rodger.Kibbleitri.brighton.ac.uk
 Kees.van.Deemteritri.brighton.ac.uk
Fax: +44 1273 642908

CALL FOR PAPERS

S A L S A

The Symposium About Language and Society-Austin is pleased to announce its
Seventh Annual Meeting to be held
April 9-11, 1999 at the University of Texas at Austin. We encourage the
submission of abstracts on research that
addresses the relationship of language to culture and society. Desired
frameworks include but are not limited to:

LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION
SPEECH PLAY, VERBAL ART, AND POETICS
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LANGUAGE

1999 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Jill Brody
Louisiana State University

Charles Goodwin
University of California, Los Angeles

Marjorie Harness Goodwin
University of California, Los Angeles

Elizabeth Keating
University of Texas at Austin

Selected papers delivered at the conference will be published as a special
edition of the Texas Linguistic Forum.
Speakers will be allowed 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for
discussion. Papers will be selected based
on the evaluation of an anonymous written abstract which may not exceed one
page (using 10 pt. font or larger).

Please submit:
1) six (6) copies of the abstract, on 81/2 x 11 paper, to the address
below.

2) a 3x5 card with the following information:
 a) The title of the paper
 b) Author's name
 c) Author's affiliation
 d) Address, phone number, and email address at which the author
wishes to be notified.

3) a short 100 word abstract, on a 3.5" disk (Mac or PC), for
publication in the conference program.
 Texts must be word-processed in text-only ASCII or Microsoft Word
(Mac or PC). Please label your disk clearly.

See the SALSA web page for more details:
http:\\www.dla.utexas.edu\depts\anthro\projects\salsa

Deadline for receipt of abstracts is January 15, 1999. Late submissions
will not be accepted, and we cannot accept
papers which are to be published elsewhere. Notification of acceptance or
rejection will be sent in mid-February,
 1999. Registration fees will be approximately $20 for students and $35
for non-students. Papers must be received
 by early June, 1999 to be included in the published proceedings.

Send all correspondence to:
 SALSA
 Department of Linguistics
 University of Texas at Austin
 Austin, TX 78712
 email: SALSAccwf.cc.utexas.edu

Anastasia Coles
Amanda Doran
Nisha Merchant Goss

SALSA VII Co-chairs
SALSAccwf.cc.utexas.edu