LINGUIST List 14.373

Thu Feb 6 2003

FYI: CfA,TESOL Newsletter,MS Comp Ling, EUROLAN-2003

Editor for this issue: James Yuells <jameslinguistlist.org>

Directory

JFDP, CfA: U.S. Hosts for Balkan/Eurasian Scholars

Maher Bahloul, MA TESOL Newsletter

vanvalin, Interdisciplinary MS Program in Computational Linguistics at Buffalo

Dan Cristea, EUROLAN-2003 Summer School - First call for participation

Message 1: CfA: U.S. Hosts for Balkan/Eurasian Scholars

Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 15:46:44 -0500
From: JFDP <JFDPamericancouncils.org>
Subject: CfA: U.S. Hosts for Balkan/Eurasian Scholars

Call for Applications from U.S. Host Institutions for the 2003-2004 Academic Year

American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS Junior Faculty Development Program (JFDP)

American Councils is pleased to announce opportunities for U.S. institutions to host participants of the Junior Faculty Development Program (JFDP) for the 2003-2004 academic year. JFDP is a non-degree, professional development program intended to provide opportunities for university faculty from 15 Balkan and Eurasian countries to develop new courses, implement curriculum reform, and cultivate new teaching skills and techniques through exposure to U.S. educational methods.

JFDP Fellows are selected through open competitions in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

JFDP Fellows help internationalize their U.S. host institutions by bringing cultural diversity and new perspectives in teaching and learning. Likewise, Fellows may serve as potential vehicles for on-going collaborations and institutional partnerships. During the program, JFDP Fellows informally attend courses in their fields of study. As visiting scholars, Fellows may make presentations, give special lectures, co-teach courses or participate in departmental projects, if such opportunities exist. U.S. hosts are asked to provide a faculty advisor who is willing to guide the Fellow with academic pursuits related to course development, professional networking, and research.

JFDP is a fully funded program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) of the U.S. Department of State. Information and the host application are located at the JFDP Web-site: http://www.americancouncils.org/JFDP

The JFDP Web-site offers a fully online application and an option to download the printable application. Printed applications may be faxed or mailed to the address below.

Deadline: Friday, March 14, 2003

Junior Faculty Development Program American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS 1776 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 700 Washington, DC 20036 Tel: (202) 833-7522; Fax: (202) 293-0037 JFDPamericancouncils.org

Message 2: MA TESOL Newsletter

Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 22:51:39 +0400
From: Maher Bahloul <mbahloulaus.ac.ae>
Subject: MA TESOL Newsletter

FYI Please find the link to the first issue of the MA TESOL Newsletter.

http://www.ausharjah.edu/cas/matesol/newsletter/index.htm

Dr. Maher Bahloul, Coordinator, MA TESOL Program

- Maher Bahloul, PhD www.bahloul.com Assistant Professor of English & Linguistics MA TESOL Program Coordinator http://www.ausharjah.edu/cas/matesol/index.htm American University of Sharjah Department of English, Mass Communication & Translation P.O.Box 26666 Sharjah, UAE Phone (971-6) 515-2714 e-mail: mbahloulausharjah.edu

Message 3: Interdisciplinary MS Program in Computational Linguistics at Buffalo

Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 14:12:56 -0500
From: vanvalin <vanvalinacsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: Interdisciplinary MS Program in Computational Linguistics at Buffalo

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Department of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo (The State University of New York) jointly participate in a master's-level curriculum in Computational Linguistics resulting in a M.S. in Natural Sciences. We are now accepting applications for the Fall 2003 semester (application deadlines: May 1 for international students, May 15 for US students). The curriculum consists of an equal number of computer science and linguistics courses and a final project and typically takes four semesters to complete. The research interests of the faculty in the curriculum are diverse and include speech recognition, grammar development, parsing, statistical NLP, computational semantics, and knowledge representation. For any question regarding this curriculum or applications, visit our webpage (http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/programs/cl_curriculum.htm ) or contact, Professors William J. Rapaport (rapaportcse.buffalo.edu) or Jean-Pierre Koenig (jpkoenigbuffalo.edu).

Message 4: EUROLAN-2003 Summer School - First call for participation

Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2003 13:43:18 +0200
From: Dan Cristea <dcristeainfoiasi.ro>
Subject: EUROLAN-2003 Summer School - First call for participation

EUROLAN-2003

Summer School on

"The Semantic Web and Language Technology - Its Potential and Practicalities"

28 July - 8 August 2003 Bucharest - Romania http://www.infoiasi.ro/~eurolan/eurolan2003

- First Call For Participation -

The Eurolan series of summer schools was established in 1993 and has been held every other year, with the goal of stimulating young researchers from all over the world to pursue high-level research in natural language processing and language technology.

Theme

The fifth EUROLAN in the series will have as topic all aspects of the developing Semantic Web technology and consider its potential and the practicalities of applying it to enhance language processing applications.

The promise of the Semantic Web has evoked enormous interest within the community developing language technologies. On the one hand, it offers the potential to exploit ontological descriptions of language data in order to enable inferencing capabilities, which may not only drastically enhance semantic processing, but also alter our conceptions of the ways in which knowledge is represented and exploited in language processing applications. On the other hand, to take full advantage of this evolving technology, researchers and developers will need to understand the potential as well as the limitations of the Semantic Web and master a range of new technologies that have been designed to enable it. Finally, the language technology community must be ready to contribute to Semantic Web development in order to ensure that it meets the requirements for language processing applications.

The so-called "Semantic Web community" encompasses several research communities that have previously worked independently of one another, including researchers in knowledge representation, ontology development, and "knowledge exploitation"; web developers (including developers of standards such as XML, RDF, OWL, etc.); and those who directly need to exploit knowledge in applications. Linguistic knowledge used in language processing at its various levels (morphological, syntactic, lexical, discourse, etc.) includes a substantial part of general knowledge and poses a significant challenge to Semantic Web developers in order to handle the precision and complexity required for language processing applications. Whatever the Semantic Web may evolve to be, researchers and developers in language technology clearly need to learn what it is and how it can be exploited for language processing, and at the same time, work with semantic web developers to ensure that the semantic web infrastructure is maximally usable for language processing applications. EUROLAN-2003 will provide two weeks of intensive study of semantic web technology and its application to natural language processing. Internationally known scholars and researchers involved in leading-edge work in relevant areas will serve as professors at the school, providing half- and full-day seminars and hands-on labs to provide students with in-depth understanding and experience.

Topics to be covered in the school include the following:

* What is the Semantic Web? * Potential and limitations of the semantic web * Supporting web technologies (XML, RDF) * Ontologies, ontology design and development * Ontology exploitation via inferencing * Description logics and other approaches to inferencing * Lexical semantics and the semantic web * Use of the semantic web and related technologies in language processing applications

The list of invited personalities is as follows:

* Dan Cristea, "Al. I. Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania * Thierry Declerck, DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany * James Hendler, University of Maryland at College Park, USA * Jerry Hobbs, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, USA * Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA * Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa, Italy * Robert Meersman, Vrije Universiteit, Brussel, Belgium * Srini Narayanan, SRI-International, Menlo Park, SUA * Sergei Nirenburg, New Mexico University, USA * Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania * Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI and University of Saarbruecken, Germany * Wolfgang Wahlster, DFKI and University of Saarbruecken, Germany * Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, England

Program

Eurolan-2003 will take place between 28 July and 8 August 2003 in Bucharest - Romania.

The summer school will be organized to allow for both lectures and hands-on experience for each of the areas covered. Morning sessions will be devoted to tutorials, followed by afternoon sessions at which students will work in collaboration with professors on practical applications. The school will also include one workshop as well as round tables and work meetings on topics of particular interest related to the school's theme. They will be announced at a later date.

On Sunday, 3 August, a trip to significant Romanian landmarks will be organized.

Registration and Fees

Information about registration and fees will be posted at a later date.

Program Committee

Dan Cristea Nancy Ide Jerry Hobbs Dan Tufis Hans Uszkoreit

Information on previous Eurolan events can be consulted at the address: http://www.infoiasi.ro/fcs/en/events.html.