LINGUIST List 9.652

Tue May 5 1998

Calls: Texts & Realities, NLP

Editor for this issue: Anita Huang <anitalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. ELLCONLK, Creating Sense
2. Chadia Moghrabi, NLP+IA'98 On all aspects of NLP

***SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS***

CREATING SENSE:
TEXTS AND REALITIES

Organized by 
The Department of English Language & Literature 
National University of Singapore 
 		
with
Cambridge University Press 
and 
Materials Development Association (MATSDA)

7-9 September, 1998
Venue: Orchard Hotel, Singapore 

Keynote presenters:
David Nunan (University of Hong Kong) 
Liz Hamp-Lyons (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Mario Rinvolucri (Pilgrims, Canterbury)
Jane Arnold (University of Seville) 

Our conference web-site: 
http://nusinfo.nus.sg/NUSinfo/FASS/ELL/createsense98

***Call for Papers***
The conference organisers invite papers, both theoretical and practical,
that explore and characterise some of the main ways in which language is
used to create "sense" in contemporary life. We encourage papers that
present recent developments and address significant theoretical issues
in studies of language and discourse, and that explore ideas and
applications in the broad domains of language education and media
studies. 

Parallel papers will last for 30 minutes, with 10 additional minutes for
discussion. 

***Call for Workshops***
The organisers invite proposals for 3-hour afternoon workshop sessions,
from intending conference participants (not only paper presenters) who
are willing to take on the role of workshop leader. The main aim of
workshops is to provide participants with opportunities to become
actively involved in developing, adapting or evaluating educational
materials in language education and media studies, on topics related to
the major theoretical issues arising from the conference theme.
Workshops can be planned for 3, 6, or 9 hours. 
 
Please send abstracts of about 200 words to the Programme Committee, in
accordance with the guidelines that follow. Write or (preferably)
e-mail to:
 
 	Programme Committee (attention: D. Allison)
 	"Creating Sense" Conference
 	Department of English Language & Literature
 	National University of Singapore
 	10 Kent Ridge Crescent
 	Singapore 119260
 
Departmental fax: (65)-7732981		
E-mail: ellconlknus.edu.sg

GUIDELINES for submissions: 
Your abstract must specify the category (paper or workshop) of the
proposed presentation. Please submit three anonymous copies of the
abstract (including the title of your paper or workshop) for review
purposes, plus a fourth copy that includes the author's name and
affiliation. Please also include a notecard (size 3" by 5"), stating
author's name, affiliation, title of paper or workshop, contact
telephone and fax numbers, e-mail address, and postal address. Paper
presenters are asked to specify any special requirements for their
presentation. (All rooms will have overhead projectors.) Workshop
presenters are asked to specify the intended length of the workshop (a
workshop may run for 3, 6 or 9 hours) and to specify any special
requirements for their workshop session.
 
Deadline for abstracts: 15 May 1998	
Replies will be sent by end May 1998


- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 			Conference Theme
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
The focus of this Conference will be on notions of "creating" or
"making" sense, both in education and more widely throughout society.
"Making sense" sounds reassuringly uncontroversial, and it has taken the
insights of Jerome Bruner in the 1960s, and of Michael Halliday and his
associates in recent years, to bring out the richness of meaning that
this expression can carry. It is now widely accepted that
sense is not simply "there" in the world, waiting to be discovered and
documented, but that it is actually created by human beings in
societies. The idea that "reality" is "created" in language also implies
that there must be more than one reality, and that a number of realities
can be articulated and compared. These possibilities carry major
implications for language education, social identity and participation
- - or, less reassuringly, for educational and social exclusion. The
thematic emphasis of this conference on "creating sense", then, includes
the essential notions that any single form of sense can also be
questioned and "unmade", and that alternative kinds of sense can be
remade or "re-created" through texts.
 
Making, unmaking and remaking meanings are fundamental aspects of
social and educational experience, from infancy through primary and
secondary school years and beyond, continuing into adulthood and
maturity. Much education has to do with learning to think, talk and
write about things in ways that differ from the initial "commonsense"
knowledge or belief that children have already acquired in their
communities. To bring this about without undermining what is valid and
valued in children's lives is an enormously challenging and
problematic social and cultural activity. That it is also a necessary
one can be argued both in terms of mainstream rationality (the
development of scientific thinking being a prime example here) and of
critical awareness, which includes learning to deconstruct powerful
people's accounts of how the world is and ought to be, and to propose
alternative accounts. Full participation in social and political life
is only possible when people have learned, as Ronald Carter has put
it, how to "see through language".
 
These concerns over creating, questioning and re-creating sense are
explored in this conference in relation to two domains, those of
language education and media studies.
 
In the context of formal education, learners have both to discern
meaning in what is offered to them and actively to make "their own"
meanings as they interpret and analyse experience from a variety of
perspectives which may be proposed to them or discovered by them. All
this raises important issues of participation and exclusion relating
to learners' personal and social explorations of language, and the
ways in which these two modes of exploration may be related. The
conference will pursue these concerns in the broad context of language
education as its first domain.
 
The second conference domain is that of media studies, with particular
attention to media discourse and reality construction. The conference
seeks to bring to light some of the ways in which realities, like
stories, are invented, told, represented and mediated through
available technologies. Diverse experiences and accounts of reality
are constructed through the interplay of language and image. These
can, for instance, be presented as fantasies, fictional explorations
of experience, docu-dramas or documentary coverage of events, among
other things. The impact of such accounts on audiences and "the
public" depends on many social, cultural and educational factors, but
the need for modern citizens to be able to make their own sense of
accounts that are offered to them, and also to offer accounts of their
own, increasingly appears fundamental to effective social
participation as well as to social critique.

The conference looks to stimulate debate that is grounded in --- or
informedly set against --- current theories, practices and findings of
teaching and research communities in language and communication
studies. Another main aim is to suggest guidelines for informed,
responsible and reflective practice in the domains of language
education and media studies. A theme of particular interest, to be
developed especially in workshop mode, is that of materials writing
for educational purposes in both conference domains.

A number of colleagues have been wondering if NLP+IA'98 is MAINLY about
language Learning & Teaching. The answer is no! CALL is getting a special
attention not the exclusivity. All aspects of NLP are welcome!

400 word Abstract Submissions MAY 5TH 1998.
Notification: June 15, 1998
Camera-ready of full papers: August 1st, 1998

Chadia Moghrabi

 CALL FOR PAPERS & EXHIBITS
================Appel aux communications & expositions =====================

 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
 ON
 NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS

 NLP+IA 98
 >>> Special accent on Computer assisted language learning <<<

 Conference internationale
 sur le traitement automatique des langues et
 ses applications industrielles

 TAL+AI 98
 >>> Attention speciale portee a l'enseignement de la langue <<<

 AUGUST/aout 18 - 21, 1998

 Moncton, New-Brunswick, CANADA


Come to Canada this summer...
IWNLG August 5-7 in Niagara-on-the-Lake
Coling-ACL & workshops August 10-16 in Montreal
NLP+IA/CALL August 18-21 in Moncton


TOPICS OF INTEREST:
The NLP Study Group (GRETAL) at l'Universite de Moncton is organizing
its second international conference on NLP and industrial applications.
This year a special attention is given to Computer assisted language
learning & teaching.


Papers are invited on ALL ASPECTS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, including,
but not limited to,
* computer assisted language learning & teaching,
* natural language understanding and generation of textual, spoken and
 hand-written language,
* natural language interfaces to databases, expert systems, or industrial
 applications
* machine translation, computer aided translation, translation
 aids,
* syntax, semantics, pragmatics, lexicon, morphology,
* dictionaries, corpora, & other language resources
* multimodality
* multilinguality
* NLP industrial applications
* papers of every kind that can help bridge the gap between the theory and
 practice of NLP in general and Language learning in particular.


LANGUAGE:
Authors are invited to submit preliminary versions of their
papers not exceeding 400 words (exclusive of references) either in
English or in French, the two official languages of the conference.
Proceedings would be published in the language of the submitted
texts. Final versions would be around 7-8 pages.


SUBMISSION:
1) The first page should be an identification page containing the title,
the authors' names, affiliations, addresses, a five (5) keyword list
specifying the subject area, a five (5) line summary, and the name and
address of the contact person.
 TITLE/ Titre:
 AUTHORS INFO/ Auteurs et infos:
 KEYWORDS/ Mots clefs:
 SUMMARY/ Resume:
 CONTACT PERSON/ Personne contact:

2) Abstracts should not exceed 400 words in length excluding references (12
pt, times roman, 1 inch margins (2,5 cm) all around; if using A4 please
keep text within 19cm x 25,5 cm).

3) The identification page and the abstract should be submitted in 4 HARD
COPIES (12 pt, times roman, 1 inch margins (2,5 cm) all around; if using A4
please keep text within 19 cm x 25,5 cm) to:

 NLP+IA 98 / TAL+AI 98
 Pr. Chadia Moghrabi
 GETA, CLIPS, IMAG
 385 rue de la Bibliotheque
 BP 53 X
 38041 Grenoble Cedex 9
 France
 Phone: +33 4 76 51 4369
 Fax: +33 4 76 51 4405
 E-mail: NLP+IA-98imag.fr

4) The identification page should also be e-mailed in plain text.


REFEREEING:
All submissions shall be refereed by three members of the Program
committee.


INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Anne De Roeck (Essex, UK)
Arnold Smith (NRC, Canada)
Chadia Moghrabi (Moncton, Canada)
Christian Boitet (GETA, Grenoble, France)
Chrysanne DiMarco (Logos, Waterloo, Canada)
Eric Wehrli (Geneva, Switzerland)
Eva Hajicova (Charles U., Prague)
Genvieve Caelen-Haumont (GEOD, Grenoble, France)
Graeme Hirst (Toronto, Canada)
Harry Bunt (Tilburg, Netherlands)
Henry Hamburger (George Mason, USA)
Howard Hamilton (Regina, Canada)
Jean-Pierre Chanod (Xerox, France)
Johanna Moore (Pennsylvania, USA)
John Hutchins (East Anglia, UK)
John Tait (Sunderland, UK)
Junichi Tsujii (UMIST & Tokyo, Japan)
Kathleen McCoy (Delaware, USA)
Margaret King (ISSCO, Switzerland)
Manfred Stede (TU-Berlin, Germany)
Marcel Cori (Paris-7, France)
Mark Seligman (GETA-CLIPS & Red Pepper, USA)
Michael Levison (Queens, Canada)
Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC/CNR, Pisa, Italy)
Pierre Isabelle (RALI, Montreal, Canada)
Pierrette Bouillon (Geneva, Switzerland)
Paul Tarau (Moncton, Canada)
Remi Chadel (Inxight, Xerox, France)
Roberto Basili (Roma, Italy)
Ruddy Lelouche (Laval, Canada)
Susan Armstrong (ISSCO, Geneva, Switzerland)
Thierry Chanier (Franche-Comte, France)
Thierry van Steenberghe (Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium)
Veronica Dahl (Simon Fraser, Canada)
Yael Ravin (IBM, USA)
Yorick Wilks (Sheffield, UK)


SCHEDULE:
Submissions are due NOW ON MAY 5TH 1998.
Notification of receipt will be mailed to the contact person soon after
receipt.
Authors will be notified of acceptance by 15 june 1998. Camera-ready
copies of final full papers must be received by the 1st of August 1998 along
with registration fees.

Participants are also requested to indicate their intention to participate in
the conference as soon as possible to the same e-mail address with the
single word INTENTION in the subject line.


EXHIBITS:
Anyone wishing to arrange an exhibit or present a demonstration should
send a brief electronic description along with a specification of physical
requirements (table size, power, telephone connections, number of chairs,
etc.) to the same address with the single word EXHIBIT in the subject line.


OTHER ACTIVITIES:
Accompanying persons can enjoy the lovely outdoor living in New-Brunswick
and visit the highest tides in the world. Moncton is only 20km
away from the sandy beaches of Shediac, la Capitale mondiale du homard.


CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION:
The conference is organized by GRETAL, Groupe d'etude sur le traitement
automatique des langues at the Universite' de Moncton in cooperation with
GETA-CLIPS at l'Universite' Joseph Fourier in Grenoble. The members of the
organizing committee are:

Chadia Moghrabi, Professor of Computer Science, Conference chair
Jalal Almhana, Director & Professor of Computer Science
Julien Chiasson, Professor of Computer Science
Sadek Eid, Professor of Industrial engineering, director Manufacturing
 Technology Centre
Boubaker Meddeb-Hamrouni, Researcher GETA & WinSoft
Paul Tarau, Professor of Computer Science