Category: corpus linguistics

#CFP Words, Words, Words – Corpora and Lexis 36th ICAME conference

The University of Trier has the honour of organizing the

36th Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English

in Trier, Germany

Conference dates: 27–31 May 2015

The theme chosen for the conference is: Words, Words, Words – Corpora and Lexis

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* Please support our conference grant proposal by signing up     *
* to the notification list by 15 October – see below. Thank you! *
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The conference will follow the typical ICAME format: On Wednesday afternoon, we will start with the pre-conference workshops, and the day will end with a first plenary and a reception at the “Electoral Palace” (Kurfürstliches Palais) – one of the most beautiful rococo palaces in the world. Other regulars include the conference excursion on Friday afternoon and the gala dinner on Saturday evening. The conference will end at lunchtime on Sunday.

CONFERENCE VENUE AND ACCOMMODATION
The conference will be held at the ERA Conference Centre in Trier. The venue is within walking distance from the city centre and directly adjacent to the conference hotel, the Arcadia Hotel Trier. A range of alternative accommodation options is available within walking distance. Further information will be provided on the conference website (and in future circulars) before registration opens.

ACADEMIC PROGRAMME
The programme will consist of full papers, work-in-progress reports, a poster session, software demonstrations, as well as invited plenary talks. The following speakers have agreed to give plenaries at the conference:
 
• Kate Burridge, Monash University
• Thomas Herbst, Erlangen University
• Graeme Trousdale, Edinburgh University
• Edmund Weiner, Oxford University / OED

There will also be up to three pre-conference workshops. Two workshops have already been fixed:

Workshop I: The International Corpus of English (ICE). Convenor: Gerry Nelson
Workshop II: Corpus linguistics and linguistic innovations in non-native Englishes. Convenors: Sandra C. Deshors (Las Cruces), Sandra Götz (Giessen) & Samantha Laporte (Louvain-la-Neuve)

If you are interested in convening the third workshop, please contact the organisers with a brief proposal. Once the conference website lists the maximum number of three workshops, no further proposals can be accommodated.

SOCIAL PROGRAMME
On Friday afternoon, there will be an excursion to Bernkastel-Kues. This will include a boat trip on the Moselle, an opportunity to taste some of the excellent local wine, great views and a dinner at Kloster Machern. We are currently investigating a range of other options to complete the social programme. Further information will be provided in due time.

CALL FOR PAPERS
We particularly invite papers that take up the conference theme of “Corpora and Lexis”. However, submissions that relate to other topic areas of English corpus linguistics are of course also welcome.
Individual papers will be allowed 30 minutes, including 10 minutes for discussion; work-in-progress reports will be 15 minutes long, including 5 minutes for discussion. The deadline for abstract submission is 15th December 2014. Abstracts of 400-600 words in length (excluding references) should be submitted online at
        http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/icame/abstracts_submission.html

On the form, please indicate whether your contribution is a paper, a work-in-progress report, a poster or a software demonstration. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 15th January 2015.

For the pre-conference workshops, separate calls for papers will be issued. Please consult the conference website for further information.

SIGN-UP TO NOTIFICATION LIST
This first circular for ICAME 36 is widely circulated (e.g. on the Corpora and Linguist mailing lists). Future information relating to the conference will however only be sent to people who sign up to our notification list:

        http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/icame/signup.html

In addition, this list will give us important information to support the grant proposal we have submitted to the German Research Foundation (DFG). The DFG would ideally want to have a complete list of participants by October. Obviously, this is not possible. In addition, the DFG needs to know the proportion of conference participants who hold a PhD degree. For this reason, we would like to collect information about potential participants of the conference. This will allow us to provide convincing proof of the significance of the conference to the DFG, and we will also be able to estimate proportions of participants with and without a PhD.
The DFG grant we have applied for is substantial and would make a major difference to the final conference fees. If at all possible, please sign up to this notification list by October 15th at the very latest. Thank you!

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
The local organising committee consists of:

• Anne-Katrin Blass
• Daniela Kolbe-Hanna
• Sebastian Hoffmann (chair)
• Lilian Lee Hoffmann
• Andrea Sand
• Michael Stubbs

CONFERENCE WEBSITE / CONTACT
All relevant information about the conference will be posted on the following website:

        http://icame36.uni-trier.de

If you wish to get in touch with the organisers, please use the following email address: icame36@uni-trier.de

For more informal updates, please “like” our Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/icame36

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Prof. Dr. Sebastian Hoffmann

FB II Anglistik
Universität Trier
D-54286 Trier

#corpusMOOC Corpus Linguistics: Method, Analysis, Interpretation starts Sept 29

futurelearnlogo

This free MOOC Offers practical introduction to the methodology of corpus linguistics for researchers in social sciences and humanities. It is an 8-week course and is run by Lancaster University.

More information here.

 

 

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC): Our Use Of Little Words Can, Uh, Reveal Hidden Interests @NPR

An NPR feature which disccusses W. Pennebaker contribution to human use of words.

This was also the subject of my own contribution to the 2010 World Congress of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies within the session “Interdisciplinary research between Corpus Linguistics and Clinical Psychology” at Boston University, MA.

 

In memory of Geoffrey Leech, by Greg Myers

From the wp.lancs.ac.uk  site: 
Geoff Leech was born in Gloucester in 1936. He studied at University College London for his BA, MA, and PhD, and taught there as a lecturer. He came to Lancaster in 1969 as one of the first language specialists in the English Department, and in 1974 he became the first Head of the new Linguistics Department, and its first Professor. He played a crucial role in almost all the developments in the department as it grew to be one of the major centres of linguistics. In 1996 he took early retirement, but he continued as a Research Professor, and he has remained active in research, departmental duties such as PhD supervision and examining, talks to students, and contacts with the many visitors who came from around the world to see him. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, was awarded honorary doctorates from Lund and Charles University, and had many other honours.
Read the entire text here. 

CFP Language Resources and Evaluation Journal, entitled “Under-resourced Languages, Collaborative Approaches and Linked Open Data: Resources, Methods and Applications”

Submissions for a Special Issue of the Language Resources and Evaluation Journal, entitled “Under-resourced Languages, Collaborative Approaches and Linked Open Data: Resources, Methods and Applications”.

Important: More detailed information will be made available in September 2014. For more information please contact the guest editors.

PRELIMINARY SUBMISSION DATE: November 15, 2014

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Under-resourced languages are generally described as languages that suffer from a chronic lack of available resources, from human, financial, and time resources to linguistic ones (language data and language technology), and often also experience the fragmentation of efforts in resource development. This situation is exacerbated by the realization that as technology progresses and the demand for localised languages services over digital devices increases, the divide between adequately- and under-resourced languages keeps widening. Given that most of the world’s almost 7000 languages are not adequately resourced, much work needs to be done in order to support their existence in the digital age.

Although the destiny of a language is primarily determined by its native speakers and broader cultural context, the technological development of an under-resourced language offers such a language a strategic opportunity to have the same “digital dignity”, “digital identity” and “digital longevity” as large, well-developed languages on the Web.

The Linked (Open) Data framework and the emerging Linguistic Linked (Open) Data infrastructure offer novel opportunities for under-resourced languages. On the one hand, Linked Data offers ways of exposing existing high quality, albeit small, language resources in the Semantic Web and, on the other hand, allows for the development of new state-of-the-art resources without necessarily having to rely on the availability of sophisticated language processing support.

This special issue arises from the imperative to maintain cultural and language diversity and from the basic right of all communities, languages, and cultures to be “first class citizens” in an age driven by information, knowledge and understanding. In this spirit, this special issue focuses on three strategic approaches to augment the development of resources for under-resourced languages to achieve a level potentially comparable to well-resourced, technologically advanced languages, viz. a) using the crowd and collaborative platforms; b) using technologies of interoperability with well-developed languages; and c) using Semantic Web technologies and, more specifically, Linked Data.

We invite original contributions, not published before and not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that address one or more of the following questions by means of one or more of the three approaches mentioned above:

• How can collaborative approaches and technologies be fruitfully applied to the accelerated development and sharing of high quality resources for under-resourced languages?

• How can such resources be best stored, exposed and accessed by end users and applications?

• How can small language resources be re-used efficiently and effectively, reach larger audiences and be integrated into applications?

• How can multilingual and cross-lingual interoperability of language resources, methods and applications be supported, also between languages that belong to different language families?

• How can existing language resource infrastructures be scaled to thousands of languages?

• How can research on and resource development for under-resourced languages benefit from current advances in semantic and semantic web technologies, and specifically the Linked Data framework?

GUEST EDITORS
Laurette Pretorius – University of South Africa, South Africa (pretol AT unisa DOT ac DOT za)
Claudia Soria – CNR-ILC, Italy (claudia.soria AT ilc DOT cnr DOT it)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Sabine Bartsch, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Delphine Bernhard, LILPA, Strasbourg University, France
Peter Bouda, CIDLeS – Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation, Portugal
Paul Buitelaar, Insight Centre for Data Analytics, NUIG, Ireland
Steve Cassidy, Macquarie University, Australia
Christian Chiarcos, Frankfurt University, Germany
Thierry Declerck, DFKI GmbH, Language Technology Lab, Germany
Mikel Forcada, University of Alicante, Spain
Dafydd Gibbon, Bielefeld University, Germany
Yoshihiko Hayashi, Graduate School of Language and Culture, Osaka University, Japan
Sebastian Hellmann, Leipzig University, Germany
Simon Krek, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Tobias Kuhn, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI, France
John McCrae, Bielefeld University, Germany
Steven Moran, Universität Zürich, Switzerland
Kellen Parker, National Tsing Hua University, China
Patrick Paroubek, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Taher Pilehvar, “La Sapienza” Rome University, Italy
Maria Pilar Perea i Sabater, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Laurette Pretorius, University of South Africa, South Africa
Leonel Ruiz Miyares, Centro de Linguistica Aplicada (CLA), Cuba
Kevin Scannell, St. Louis University, USA
Ulrich Schäfer, Technical University of Applied Sciences Amberg-Weiden, Bavaria, Germany
Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Italy
Nick Thieberger, University of Melbourne, Australia
Eveline Wandl-Vogt, Austrian Academy of Sciences, ICLTT, Austria
Michael Zock, LIF-CNRS, France

Multi-Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on. A tribute to Douglas Biber

Edited by Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano Pinto
São Paulo Catholic University
Approximately a quarter of a century ago, the Multi-Dimensional (MD) approach—one of the most powerful (and controversial) methods in Corpus Linguistics—saw its first book-length treatment. In its eleven chapters, this volume presents all new contributions covering a wide range of written and spoken registers, such as movies, music, magazine texts, student writing, social media, letters to the editor, and reports, in different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) and contexts (engineering, journalism, the classroom, the entertainment industry, the Internet, etc.). The book also includes a personal account of the development of the method by its creator, Doug Biber, an introduction to MD statistics, as well as an application of MD analysis to corpus design. The book should be essential reading to anyone with an interest in how texts, genres, and registers are used in society, what their lexis and grammar look like, and how they are interrelated.
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 60]  2014.  xxxviii, 328 pp.