http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/filt/events/conferences/2004/msg01136.html
Prague: Computing and Historical Phonology, a workshop at ACL 2007 -- CFP
* To: <rasmusse at ptd dot net>
* Subject: Prague: Computing and Historical Phonology, a workshop
at ACL 2007 -- CFP
* From: "Priscilla Rasmussen" <rasmusse at ptd dot net>
* Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:58:30 -0500
* Organization: ACL/AMTA/ARCS/dg.o
* Reply-to: "Priscilla Rasmussen" <rasmusse at ptd dot net>
Call for Papers
ACL Workshop, 2007 Prague
Computing and Historical Phonology
Ninth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational
Morphology and Phonology
June 28, 2007
Keynote Speaker
Brett Kessler, Washington University, St. Louis, will speak on
word similarity metrics and multilateral comparison.
Chairs: John Nerbonne, Greg Kondrak, Mark Ellison
Background
Historical phonology is the study of how the sounds and sound systems
of a language evolve, and includes research issues concerning the
triggering of sound changes; their temporal and geographic propagation
(including lexical diffusion); the regularity/irregularity of sound
change; the role of borrowing and analogy in sound change; the
interaction of sound change with the phonemic system (potentially
promoting certain changes, but also neutralizing phonemic
distinctions); and the detection of these phenomena in historical
documents.
There is a substantial and growing body of work applying computational
techniques of various sorts to problems in historical phonology. We
mention a few here to give a flavor of the sort of work we would like
to organize as a coherent theme in a SIGMORPHON workshop. Kessler
(2001) estimates the likelihood of chance correspondences using
permutation statistics; Kondrak (2002) develops algorithms to detect
cognates and sound correspondences; McMahon and McMahon (2005) and
also Nakhleh, Ringe and Warnow (2005) apply phylogenetic techniques to
comparative reconstruction; and Ellison and Kirby (2006) suggest means
of detecting relationships which do not depend on word by word
comparisons. But we hasten to add that many more important problems
may also be addressed computationally (see below).
Workshop
The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers
interested in applying computational techniques to problems in
historical phonology. We deliberately define the scope of the
workshop broadly to include problems such as identifying spelling
variants in older manuscripts, searching for cognates, hypothesizing
and confirming sound changes and/or sound correspondences, modeling
likely sound changes, the relation between synchronic social and
geographic variation to historical change, the detection of phonetic
signals of relatedness among potentially related languages,
phylogenetic reconstruction based on sound correspondences among
languages, dating historical changes, or others.
We are emphatically open to proposals to apply techniques from other
areas to problems in historical phonology such as applying work on
confusable product names to the modeling of likely sound
correspondences or the application of phylogenetic analysis from
evolutionary biology to the problem of phonological reconstruction.
Call for papers
The workshop will be open to all areas of computation applied to
morphology and phonology. Papers will be on substantial, original, and
unpublished research on any aspect of computational phonology and
computational morphology. But we wish to focus on papers on
historical phonology.
Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research
investigating historical phonology, including detecting historical
relationships, analysing and verifying putative detection, and
and interpretation. The submission deadline is March 26, 2007.
Submission Details: see
http://www.let.rug.nl/alfa/Prague/
Program Committee
Chris Brew, Ohio State University
Pierre Darlu, Paris
Michael Dunn, Max Planck, Nijmegen
Sheila Embleton, York University, Toronto
Hans Goebl, Salzburg
Russell Gray, Auckland
Sheldon Harrison, Western Australia
Wilbert Heeringa, Groningen
Brian Joseph, Ohio State University
Brett Kessler, Washington University, St. Louis
Simon Kirby, Edinburgh
Bill Kretzschmar, Georgia
Franz Manni, Paris
Hermann Moisl, Newcastle
David Nash, Australian National University, Canberra
Michael Oakes, Sunderland
Jon Patrick, Sydney
Gerald Penn, Toronto
Janet Pierrehumbert, Northwestern
Thomas Pilz, Duisburg
Joe Salmons, Wisconsin
Tandy Warnow, University of Texas
David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins
References
Ellison, Mark and Simon Kirby (2006) Measuring Language
Divergence by Intra-Lexical Comparison. Proc. ACL 2006,
Sydney, 273-280.
Kessler, Brett (2001) The Significance of Word Lists.
CSLI: Stanford.
Kondrak, Grzegorz (2002) Algorithms for Language
Reconstruction. Ph.D Thesis, University of Toronto, July.
McMahon, April and Rob McMahon (2005) Language
Classification by Numbers, OUP: Oxford.
Nakhleh, Luay, Don Ringe and Tandy Warnow (2005) Perfect
phylogenetic networks: A new methodology for
reconstructing the evolutionary history of natural
languages. Language 81(2), 382-420.