IRCS Workshop on Linguistic Databases

11-13 December 2001
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

Organized by Steven Bird, Peter Buneman and Mark Liberman
Funded by the National Science Foundation

Call for Abstracts and Proposals

Linguistic databases are digital repositories of structured information intended to document natural language and natural communicative interaction. Over the last decade, linguistic databases have come to stand at the center of empirical research in the language sciences, and in the development of new human language technologies. Like genomic databases, linguistic databases are complex, evolving and richly annotated repositories, and pose interesting challenges for efficient representation, indexing and query. And like most scientific databases, linguistic databases have made little use of standard database technology.

The goals of the workshop are to take stock of existing research in linguistic databases, to identify the key problems, and to explore applications of current database research to these problems. More broadly, the workshop will help define the research questions of a new "linguistic database community" and initiate the ongoing interchange of relevant problems and results between this community and the database community at large.

The workshop is expected to attract participants from a range of specialties including databases, linguistics, computational linguistics, annotation and markup. There will be tutorial-style presentations on relevant models in each of these areas.

The workshop will address a selection of the following topics:

MODELS

LANGUAGES

OTHER TOPICS

Program

The program will have a varied format, designed to maximize cross-fertilization among the various specialties, and to allow extended open discussion. Components of the program will include:

Invited Speakers and Provisional Titles:

Timetable

FRIDAY 14 SEPTEMBER Proposals for tutorials and position papers - please email the organizers
FRIDAY 14 SEPTEMBER Abstracts for papers (400 words) and demonstrations (200 words) - please email the organizers
FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER Acceptance notification
FRIDAY 30 NOVEMBER Final papers (10 page limit)
TUESDAY 11 DECEMBER 9am Workshop begins
THURSDAY 13 DECEMBER 4pm Workshop ends

Proceedings

The papers will be published in web and hardcopy form (the latter just for workshop attenders).

Venue

The workshop will be held at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, USA. Workshop sessions will take place in IRCS conference rooms, located on the fourth floor of 3401 Walnut Street, adjacent to the university campus, which is two miles west of the city center. The main meeting rooms will be equipped with the usual presentation facilities, including projection and audio facilities.

Sponsorship

The workshop is being funded by some NSF grants to the University of Pennsylvania. There will be no registration fee, and hotel accomodation will be covered for presenters.

Useful Websites

Response Form

Please submit your details using this form in order to express interest in the workshop, and to receive subsequent email announcements.

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Steven Bird, Peter Buneman, & Mark Liberman (LDC, CIS, & Linguistics)
Email: sb@ldc.upenn.edu, peter@cis.upenn.edu, myl@unagi.cis.upenn.edu