LINGUIST List 18.1292: General Ling/Canada; Applied Ling,Comp Ling/Netherlands

LINGUIST List 18.1292

Mon Apr 30 2007

Calls: General Ling/Canada; Applied Ling,Comp Ling/Netherlands

Editor for this issue: Ania Kubisz <anialinguistlist.org>

Directory 1. Martina Wiltschko, Workshop on Parts and Quantities
2. Alexandros Ntoulas, iNEWS 07 (Improving Non English Web Searching), SIGIR07

Message 1: Workshop on Parts and Quantities
Date: 26-Apr-2007
From: Martina Wiltschko <wmartinainterchange.ubc.ca>
Subject: Workshop on Parts and Quantities

Full Title: Workshop on Parts and Quantities

Date: 16-Nov-2007 - 16-Nov-2007 Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Contact Person: Martina Wiltschko Meeting Email: wmartinainterchange.ubc.ca Web Site: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/mbarrie/pq.html

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Jul-2007

Meeting description:

Exploring cross-linguistic variation in the syntax and semantics of natural language expressions that are used to refer to parts or quantities.

Nominal phrases are generally used to refer to individualities (individuals or substance). In addition natural languages have various means to refer to smaller parts or larger quantities of such individualities. These strategies include (but are not restricted to) the following: - expressions for plurality - quantifiers (for count nouns (individuals) or mass nouns (substance)) - numerals - classifiers and measurers - expressions for inalienable possession (body-parts)

While most languages appear to have such expressions, it is not clear as to whether or not such expressions are indeed dedicated to their function, or whether they can acquire this function as a byproduct of a more general function. In other words, we wish to explore whether there are any universal generalizations that can be made in regards to the expression of parts and quantities: how much of the formal properties of these expressions are determined by universal grammar and how much is language-specific? As such we particularly invite papers that look at such expressions from a cross-linguistic point of view or from the point of view of languages that are generally less discussed.

Invited speakers: Jila Ghomeshi (University of Manitoba) Diane Massam (University of Toronto) Eric Mathieu (University of Ottawa) Ileana Paul (University of Western Ontario)

We invite abstracts for 20 minute talks (+10 minutes discussion) that address these issues.

Abstract requirements: 1 page, (single spaced, Font not smaller than 11points; 1'' margins)

Electronic submissions are strongly preferred. Please, submit a pdf version of your abstract to: wmartina(at)interchange(dot)ubc(dot)ca

In the subject of your e-mail: abstract In the body of your e-mail, please include Name of author(s) Title of talk Affiliation Mailing address e-mail address

Workshop website: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/mbarrie/pq.html

Important deadlines: Call for papers: April 27th 2007 Deadline for submission of abstracts: July 1st 2007 Notification of acceptance: August 1st 2007 Workshop: November 16th 2007

Organizing committee: Martina Wiltschko Mike Barrie Jason Brown Jenifer Glougie Sonja Thoma James Thompson

Message 2: iNEWS 07 (Improving Non English Web Searching), SIGIR07
Date: 26-Apr-2007
From: Alexandros Ntoulas <antoulasmicrosoft.com>
Subject: iNEWS 07 (Improving Non English Web Searching), SIGIR07

Full Title: iNEWS 07 (Improving Non English Web Searching), SIGIR07 Short Title: iNEWS 07

Date: 27-Jul-2007 - 27-Jul-2007 Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands Contact Person: Alexandros Ntoulas Meeting Email: antoulasmicrosoft.com Web Site: http://rea.teimes.gr/~lazarinf/ir7w/

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 25-May-2007

Meeting Description:

Call for papers 'iNEWS 07' (Improving Non English Web Searching) - a SIGIR 2007 workshop

''iNEWS 07'' (Improving Non English Web Searching) - a SIGIR 2007 workshop

Full title: ''Improving Web retrieval for non-English queries''

Amsterdam - 27 July 2007

Important Dates

25 May 2007 - Paper submissions due 15 June 2007 - Notifications of acceptance 22 June 2007 - Camera-ready copy due 27 July 2007 - Workshop

Call for Papers

Workshop Theme: Over 60% of the online population are non-English speakers and it is probable the number of non-English speakers is growing faster than English speakers. Recent studies showed that non-English queries and unclassifiable queries have nearly tripled since 1997. Most search engines were originally engineered for English. They do not take full account of inflectional semantics nor, for example, diacritics or the use of capitals. The main conclusion from the literature is that searching using non-English and non-Latin based queries results in lower success and requires additional user effort so as to achieve acceptable recall and precision. Further international search engines (like Yahoo and Google) are relatively weaker with monolingual non-English queries. New tools and resources are needed to support researchers in non-English retrieval. New methodologies need to be proposed which will help the identification of problems in existing search engines. New teaching strategies should be formed aiding users to become more efficient in formulating their queries.

Aims and Topics: The main objectives of the workshop are to propose techniques and to evaluate tools which improve the effectiveness of the existing search engines. The specific aims of the workshop are: - Evaluate search engines in non-English queries and measure the additional user effort. - Define methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of search engines in non-English queries. - Study the user query patterns in non-English Web retrieval. - Identify the factors that influence utilization of search engines in a multicultural world. - Propose extensions to the search engines to improve non-English Web retrieval. - Propose teaching strategies for helping users improve their searching behaviour. - Identify how standard IR techniques (Indexing, Query representation, Query reformulation, etc) can be adapted in Web retrieval for non-English languages. - Discuss the application of natural language processing techniques for non-English Web IR.

Workshop areas of interest include, but are not limited to: - Evaluation methodologies - Analysis of query logs - Localization of search engine interfaces - Performance issues of local search engines - User studies - Image and video retrieval services - Summarization - Teaching

Invited Speaker: To be announced

Journal Publication:

Authors of best papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers for a special issue of an international journal edited by the organizers with the aid of the programme committee.

Location and Date:

The workshop will be held as part of SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam, July 27, 2007.

Submissions:

Authors are invited to submit full papers or posters in PDF format using the ACM template page. The workshop accepts two types of submissions: Full papers (8 pages max) and Posters (4 pages max).

Accepted papers will be included in the print proceedings which will be distributed among the participants. Extended abstracts of the posters will also be included in the proceedings.

Please send the PDF file by email to both Fotis Lazarinis (lazarinf AT teimes.gr) and to Jesus Vilares (jvilares AT udc.es).

Workshop Organisers:

Workshop Chairs: Fotis Lazarinis, Technological Educational Institute, Mesolongli, Greece Jesus Vilares Ferro, University of A Coruna, Spain John Tait, University of Sunderland, UK

Programme Committee (alphabetically): 1. Miguel Alonso (Univ. A Coruna, Spain) 2. Theodore Dalamagas (National Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece) 3. Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) 4. Ghassan Kanaan (Yarmouk University, Jordan) 5. Noriko Kando (National Institute of Informatics, Japan) 6. Chen Kuang-hua (National Taiwan University, Taiwan) 7. David Losada (Univ. Santiago de Compostela, Spain) 8. Alexandros Ntoulas (Microsoft Search Labs, USA) 9. Doug Oard (Univ. of Maryland, USA) 10. Gabriel Pereira (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal) 11. Carol Peters (ISTI-CNR, Italy) 12. Owen Rambow (Columbia University, USA) 13. Mark Sanderson (Univ. of Sheffield, UK) 14. Jacques Savoy (Univ. of Neuchatel, Switzerland) 15. Nasredine Semmar (LIC2M/CEA-LIST, France) 16. Min Song (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA) 17. Sofia Stamou (Univ. of Patras, Greece) 18. Richard Sutcliffe (Univ. Limerick, Ireland) 19. Manuel Vilares (Univ. Vigo, Spain)