LINGUIST List 12.1454
Wed May 30 2001
FYI: Conf Suggestion, Scandinavian Summer School
Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>
Directory
sharbani, Suggestion to hold on-line conferences
Lars Hellan, Scandinavian Summer School on Constraint-based grammar
Message 1: Suggestion to hold on-line conferences
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 22:04:50 +0530
From: sharbani <sharbevsnl.net>
Subject: Suggestion to hold on-line conferences
Dear Linguists,
Everybody knows and is accustomed to the fact that for participating
in a Conference, one has to be physically present there. I don't know
if anybody stops to wonder how difficult, or rather impossible, it may
be for many many linguists and students to do that. There might be
very good and bright linguists among all those who cannot make it to
Conferences due to lack of financing, or other obligations.This
deprives them of the oportunity to get their works published, and
also, to keep themselves updated. This is particularly the case in
India; I, myself, have faced this problem too often and continue to
face it.(The difficulties mount because Linguists hardly get
jobs---atleast that's the way it is in India).
It is my request to all the organizers of Conferences to consider this
problem and perhaps to make some arrangements so that Conferences can
be held 'ON-LINE' more often. OR alternatively, to make provisions
for papers to be read 'in absentia'. Of course, there would not be any
discussions then! Perhaps someone has some ideas for solution(s) for
this situation?
Thanx for listening.
SHARBANI BANERJI
sharbevsnl.net
C/o Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies
University Of Hyderabad, Hyderabad-500,046, India.
(Contact address)
D-84, 'Matri Mandir' Sector-IX,
New Vijay Nagar,
Ghaziabad-201,009, U.P. India. =20
Message 2: Scandinavian Summer School on Constraint-based grammar
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 16:35:07 -0700
From: Lars Hellan <lhellanstanford.edu>
Subject: Scandinavian Summer School on Constraint-based grammar
SCANDINAVIAN SUMMER SCHOOL
ON CONSTRAINT-BASED GRAMMAR
6 - 11 AUGUST 2001
at the Linguistics Department, Norwegian University of
Science and Technology, Trondheim
The Linguistics Department, NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and
Technology, Trondheim), will offer a one week summer school in
Constraint-based grammars, primarily HPSG.
Topics include Syntax and Semantics in HPSG (and also Construction
Grammar), Statistical approaches to grammar, and Grammar Engineering.
Course descriptions are given below.
Lecturers are
Frederik Fouvry, Universitaet des Saarlandes.
Jean-Pierre Koenig, State University of New York, Buffalo,
Robert Levine, Ohio State University ,
Robert P. Malouf, University of Groningen,
Detmar Meurers, Ohio State University,
Stephan Oepen, YY Software and CSLI Stanford,
Carl Pollard, Ohio State University, and
Ivan A. Sag, Stanford University,
The school is sponsored by the Norwegian Research Council and the
Language Technology Programme of NorFA, and is open to all interested
parties. (Enrollment limits will be imposed only for the practical
course on Grammar engineering.)
There is no participation fee, and housing reservations can be made through
the organizers.
The summer school will take place after HPSG-2001 (Aug. 3-5, also in
Trondheim) and just before ESSLLI 2001 (Aug. 13-24, in Helsinki).
http://www.helsinki.fi/esslli/). It begins in the afternoon of Monday,
August 6, and ends in the early afternoon of Saturday, August 11.
Web address for the school (and also for HPSG-2001) is
http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/HPSG2001.
The summer school's location is the University Center at Dragvoll (in
beautiful, hilly surroundings at the outskirts of town, with a view of
the fjord, and direct access to hiking and biking trails).
Hotel rooms in Trondheim during the summer school are scarce, due to a
number of conferences and exhibitions in the area. Therefore, a bulk
reservation has been made at Trondheim Vandrerhjem (youth hostel
style). Reservations can be made through the organizers. In addition,
a few guesthouse facilities near the school site will be available.
More information: Lars Hellan and Torbj=F8rn Nordg=E5rd (organizers)
lars.hellanhf.ntnu.no
torbjorn.nordgardhf.ntnu.no
http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/HPSG2001
PRELIMINARY COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Ivan Sag, Stanford University:
Core Clauses and Construction Theory
This course introduces a systematic syntactic and semantic analysis of
key English clausal constructions, including declaratives
(indicatives, subjunctives, and subjectless clauses) interrogatives
(polars, wh-initial, wh-in situ and sluices), exclamatives and
imperatives. The approach that is presented integrates Head-Driven
Phrase Structure Grammar with key ideas from Construction Grammar
(specifically the version developed by Fillmore and Kay and their
colleagues) and Situation Semantics (in Barwise and Perry's
sense).
Literature:
Ginzburg, Jonathan, and Ivan Sag (2000) Interrogative
Investigations. CSLI Publications: Stanford
Carl Pollard, Ohio State University:
Higher-Order Grammar: a Constraint-Based and Type-Logical Foundation
for Linguistic Theory
Typed lambda calculi (Curry and Feys 1958) and their extensions known
as higher-order logics (Church 1940, Henkin 1950, Gallin 1975) are
widely employed in formal semantics. But as foundations for syntactic
theory, they appear to have found few advocates (Curry 1961, Moshier
1997). Based on a form of higher-order logic due to Lambek and Scott
(1986), this course develops a grammar framework that combines the
advantages of constraint-based and type-logical grammar. By way of
illustration, novel and extremely simple new analyses are provided for
(a) coordination of unlikes and (2) the distinction between lexical
ambiguity and neutralization (feature value syncretism).
Jean-Pierre Koenig, State University of New York, Buffalo:
Semantics and the Lexicon
This course discusses the organization of lexical knowledge, focussing
particularly on the organization of semantic knowledge and its
interface with syntax. Topics covered will include: The hierarchical
lexicon (both with type-underspecification and lexical rules),
constructional morphology, linking, the argument/adjunct distinction,
and the structure of lexical semantic representations. The approach
that will be presented is cast within Head-driven Phrase-Structure
Grammar, but comparison with Constructional Approaches to argument
structure will also be covered, as well as some experimental data on
the use of argument structure in human sentence processing.
Literature: Davis, Anthony and Jean-Pierre Koenig (2000) `Linking as
constraints on word classes in a hierarchical lexicon',
Language. 76:56-91. Koenig, Jean-Pierre (1999) Lexical
Relations. CSLI publications: Stanford.
Robert Malouf, University of Groningen:
Statistics for linguists
This course will offer a basic introduction to statistics for working
HPSG linguists. Topics to be covered include basic probability and
information theory, hypothesis testing, statistics for corpus
analysis, and stochastic attribute value grammars.
Literature:
Manning, Christopher D. and Hinrich Sch=FCtze.
1999. _Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing_. MIT
Press. Brew, Chris and Marc Moens. _Data-Intensive
Linguistics_. Available at
http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~chrisbr/dilbook/
Stephan Oepen, YY Software and CSLI Stanford,
and Frederik Fouvry, Universitaet des Saarlandes
An Introduction to Practical Grammar Engineering using HPSG
The implementation of linguistically-based grammars for natural
languages draws on a combination of engineering skills, sound
grammatical theory, and software development techniques. This course
provides a hands-on introduction to the methods and tools needed for
building the precise, extensible grammars required both in research
and in applications. Through a combination of lectures and in-class
exercises, students will investigate the implementation of constraints
in morphology, syntax, and semantics, working within the
unification-based lexicalist framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure
Grammar. Topics to be addressed in the course include: the use of
types and features, multiple inheritance, lexical rules, and
constructions. The daily implementation exercises will be conducted in
the freely-available www-csli.stanford.edu/~aac/lkb.html LKB grammar
development platform developed by Copestake et al, and will include
experience with adding and repairing lexical types, lexical entries,
lexical rules, phrase structure schemata, and compositional semantic
constraints. While most of the course work will focus on small-ish
grammars for English, we expect to apply our jointly acquired grammar
engineering expertise to at least one other language towards the end
of the week. Course registration will be limited, since this will be
a highly interactive, hands-on course.
Background Reading
- Copestake, Ann: The (New) LKB System. Manuscript. CSLI Stanford,
Stanford, CA (2000). [see the LKB web site]
- Sag, Ivan and Wasow, Tom: Syntactic Theory. A Formal
Introduction. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA (1999).
- Shieber, Stuart: An Introduction to Unification-Based Approaches to
Grammar. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA (1986).
Robert Levine and Detmar Meurers, Ohio State University:
Locality of grammatical relations
A number of phenomena have been discussed in which traditionally local
properties of embedded constituents apparently have to be visible
outside of the local domain: case assignment (Meurers,
Przepiorkowski), tag questions (Flickinger & Bender), "tough"
complement structures (Levine), or relative clauses and complementizer
agreement (Hoehle). The idea of this course is to discuss these
constructions and investigate which properties of what kind of
constituents need to persist in which non-local domain.
Literature:
As general preparation, some understanding of the setup of HPSG and
the idea of locality of selection would be helpful. So people without
an HPSG background would profit from reading chapter 1, 3, and 7 of
Pollard and Sag (1994). The two issues which caused us to look closer
at cases where locality seems to be violated are also available:
Robert Levine: 'Tough' complementation and the extraclausal
propagation of argument descriptions. In Dan Flickinger and Andreas
Kathol: On-line proceedings of the 7th International Conference on
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Available from
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/HPSG/HPSG00/hpsg00-toc.html
Detmar Meurers: Raising Spirits (and assigning them case). Groninger
Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik (GAGL), Nr. 43.
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, German Department. Available from
http://ling.osu.edu/~dm/papers/gagl-raising-spirits.html
Tentative schedule of classes:
Monday
14.00-15.15 Sag
15.45-17.00 Levine and Meurers
17.15-18.30 LKB
Tuesday - Friday
9.30-10.45 Sag
11.15-12.30 Koenig
12.30-14.00 Lunch
14.00-15.15 Pollard
15.45-17.00 Malouf
17.15-18.30 LKB/Levine and Meurers
Saturday
9.00-10.15 Koenig
10.30-11.45 Pollard
11.45-12.45 coffee
12.45-14.00 Malouf