HCSNet Update Newsletter Volume 4 Number 11

Tuesday, 18th March 2008
HCSNet Update
Wednesday 19 March 2008

Participant Spotlight

Mark Ellison, University of Western Australia

Research area: Linguistics

Languages change. Before some point in our evolutionary history, our ancestors didn't have anything we'd recognise as language. Later they had a language, and later still we have the languages we know today. There is, sadly, rarely little direct evidence for these earlier stages of language. For this reason, we rely on inference from present-day or historical language records to infer further back into the past. Making these inferences, and how far they can go, fascinates me. I am interested in harnessing Bayesian and other computational methods to assess competing hypotheses about the prehistorical stages of languages. Some of this work was published at ACL 2006 and in a workshop on computational historical phonology at ACL 2007. On a completely other front, I'm curious at how much machine-interpretable information we can extract from public sources, such as reference materials or parliamentary debates. One immediate benefit would lie in smarter search methods. Further down the line, this material could let us assess whether a text is consistent internally and with reference materials.

Contact:
Mark Ellison
University of Western Australia
Linguistics
email: hcsnet@markellison.net     www: markellison.net

News

Joint HCSNet-EII Workshop on Interactive and Ubiquitous Information Access: Call for Participation

HCSNet and the ARC Research Network in Enterprise Information Infrastructure (EII) Taskforce on Mobility and Accessing Information Infrastructures (MAII) (http://www.eii.edu.au/taskforce0607/maii) are organising a joint workshop on Interactive and Ubiquitous Information Access to be held at NICTA, the Australian Technology Park, Sydney on 16 and 17 May 2008. This workshop is designed to bring together researchers in designing systems, methodologies, infrastructure, and interactive interfaces for information access in mobile and/or ubiquitous environments. HCSNet and EII-MAII will fund travel for a number of Australian participants from outside the Sydney area. Closing date for abstracts: 4 April 2008; for more information, please click here.

New HCSNet Administrative Staff Member

A big welcome to Mel Gallagher, who will be with us for the next year based at UWS. Mel has been the Liaison Officer at MARCS Laboratories for the last three years, and before that completed an Honours degree in Psychology. Between now and then, Mel has not been idle and has just now completed a Law Degree! Mel is no stranger to HCSNet; she was seconded onto the HCSNet team and greatly assisted with the running of Summerfest 2005. Mel will, among other duties, be responsible for Summerfest 2008. On behalf of the whole HCSNet membership we welcome you to the team, Mel, and wish you well in your year at HCSNet.

Second International Conference on Problem-Based Learning in Speech-Language Pathology

To be held at Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia on 13 and 14 November 2008, this meeting will provide an opportunity to hear about international developments in PBL and discuss how PBL is adapted to meet the specific needs and situations related to human communication sciences and disorders/speech – language pathology. Educators and researchers will share their experiences and perspectives of PBL and the uses of PBL in teaching and assessing students in this field. Call for Papers: 1 April 2008; Due 30 May 2008. For more details please see: http://som.flinders.edu.au/conferences/IntPBLconference/.

Upcoming Submission Deadlines

We list here upcoming submission deadlines that fall in the next month. A more complete list of submission deadlines can be found here. Please note that any enquiries regarding these events should be directed to the event organisers, typically identified on the event's website which you can reach from the link below.

WMSCI 2008 The 12th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics

Florida, United States
Due date: 26 Mar 2008
URL: http://www.sciiis.org/wmsci2008

Language Diversity and the Acquisition of Linguistic Semantic Knowledge

Wroclaw, Poland
Due date: 27 Mar 2008
URL: http://www.zsi.pwr.wroc.pl/MISSI2008/LDALSK/

8th ISSP 8th International Seminar on Speech Production

Strasbourg, France
Due date: 28 Mar 2008
URL: http://issp2008.loria.fr/

Coling 2008 22nd Intl Conference on Computational Linguistics

Manchester, United Kingdom
Due date: 30 Mar 2008
URL: http://www.coling2008.org.uk/

Biolinguistics: acquisition and language evolution

North Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Due date: 31 Mar 2008
URL: http://www.york.ac.uk/conferences/bale2008/index.html

MLMI 2008 5th Joint Workshop on Machine Learning and Multimodal Interaction

Utrecht, Netherlands
Due date: 31 Mar 2008
URL: http://www.mlmi.info

The Eighth IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems

Nara, Japan
Due date: 31 Mar 2008
URL: http://www.u-pat.org/das08/

TIE3 Third TIE Conference on Tone and Intonation

Lisboa, Portugal
Due date: 1 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.fl.ul.pt/LaboratorioFonetica/TIE3/

Sociolinguisticsfest

Bloomington, IN, United States
Due date: 1 Apr 2008
URL: http://jones.ling.indiana.edu/~socfest/index.html

TIR-08 5th International Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval

Turin, Italy
Due date: 1 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.aisearch.de/tir-08

Academy of Aphasia

Turku, Finland
Due date: 1 Apr 2008
URL: http://academyofaphasia.org

2nd Postgraduate Conference in Cognitive Linguistics

Brighton, United Kingdom
Due date: 2 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.languageandcognition.net/pgccl

LAGB 2008 Linguistics Association of Great Britain 2008 Meeting

Colchester, United Kingdom
Due date: 4 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.essex.ac.uk/LAGB2008

Creating Second Lives

Gwynedd, United Kingdom
Due date: 5 Apr 2008
URL: http://nieci.bangor.ac.uk/conf/?q=callforpapers/3

Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Sydney, Australia
Due date: 7 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.kr.org/KR2008/

AAAI 2008 WORKSHOP ON ENHANCED MESSAGING

Chicago, United States
Due date: 7 Apr 2008
URL: http://enhancedmessagingworkshop.googlepages.com/

AAAI-08 Workshop on What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications

Chicago, United States
Due date: 7 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.whatwentwrongandwhy.org/

Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008

Ohio, United States
Due date: 7 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/reg08

Human-machine comparisons of consonant recognition in quiet and noise

Brisbane, Australia
Due date: 7 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.interspeech2008.org/

CAFFEi Comp Aspects of Affectual and Emotional Interaction

Patras, Greece
Due date: 10 Apr 2008
URL: http://caffei.iit.demokritos.gr/

CMNA 2008 8th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument

Patras, Greece
Due date: 10 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.cmna.info/CMNA8/

IVA-08 The Eighth International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

Tokyo, Japan
Due date: 11 Apr 2008
URL: http://research.nii.ac.jp/~iva2008/

SuB13 13th Sinn und Bedeutung Conference

Stuttgart, Germany
Due date: 13 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.ilg.uni-stuttgart.de/SuB13/index.html

Sixth International Workshop on Authoring of Adaptive and Adaptable Hypermedia

Hannover, Germany
Due date: 14 Apr 2008
URL: http://www.ah2008.org/index.php?section=40

UICM2 Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models 2

Brussels, Belgium
Due date: 15 Apr 2008
URL: http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~uicm2/

The 27th International Conference on Lexis and Grammar

L'Aquila, Italy
Due date: 15 Apr 2008
URL: http://infolingu.univ-mlv.fr/Colloques/lgc/

BioSem Biosemantics

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Due date: 15 Apr 2008
URL: http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html.

Upcoming Conferences

We list here upcoming conferences and workshops that fall in the next month. A more complete list of events can be found here. Please note that any enquiries regarding these events should be directed to the event organisers, typically identified on the event's website which you can reach from the link below.

SALT Semantics and Linguistic Theory 18

Amherst, United States
Date: 21 Mar 2008
to 23 Mar 2008 URL: http://umass.edu/linguist/events/salt18/

Reference to Abstract Objects in Natural Language

Barcelona, Spain
Date: 28 Mar 2008
to 29 Mar 2008 URL: URL TBA

The Neurocognition of Memory and Language

Washington DC, United States
Date: 28 Mar 2008
URL: http://cbbc.georgetown.edu/workshops/2008RA.html

Workshop on Empirical Approaches to Speech Rhythm

London, United Kingdom
Date: 28 Mar 2008
URL: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/rhythm2008

ACCEL-08 Advanced Concepts - Cognizance of English Language

Tamilnadu, India
Date: 28 Mar 2008
URL: http://www.velammal.org

ECIR 2008 30th European Conference on Information Retrieval

Glasgow, United Kingdom
Date: 30 Mar 2008
to 3 Apr 2008 URL: http://ecir2008.dcs.gla.ac.uk/

ECIR'08 Workshop - Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval

Glasgow, United Kingdom
Date: 30 Mar 2008
URL: http://www.yr-bcn.es/esair08

Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Washington, United States
Date: 31 Mar 2008
to 2 Apr 2008 URL: http://www.icwsm.org/2008/

OPEN REPOSITORIES 2008

University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Date: 1 Apr 2008
to 4 Apr 2008 URL: http://www.openrepositories.org/2008

AISB 2008 Convention Symposium on Affective Language in Human and Machine

Scotland, United Kingdom
Date: 1 Apr 2008
to 2 Apr 2008 URL: http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~cmellish/aisb08/

Sociolinguistic Issues in the Use of Language Analysis to Determine National Origin

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Date: 3 Apr 2008
to 5 Apr 2008 URL: http://www.taalstudio.nl

FSIM 4 Formal Semantics in Moscow 4

Moscow, Russian Federation
Date: 5 Apr 2008
to 6 Apr 2008 URL: http://syntactic-structures.ru

Vagueness and Language Use

Paris, France
Date: 7 Apr 2008
to 9 Apr 2008 URL: http://paulegre.free.fr/Vagueness/index.html

Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody

Ithaca, NY, United States
Date: 11 Apr 2008
to 13 Apr 2008 URL: http://ling.cornell.edu/prosody08

S2S Workshop - Beyond Short Units

Naples, Italy
Date: 16 Apr 2008
to 19 Apr 2008 URL: http://www.sound2sense.eu/index.php/s2s/workshop/beyond-short-units/

18 CGG 18th Colloquium on Generative Grammar

Lisbon, Portugal
Date: 17 Apr 2008
to 19 Apr 2008 URL: http://www.fl.ul.pt/18CGG
HCSNet Update is a weekly electronic publication of HCSNet, the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science, and is emailed to all Network participants. If you have received this newsletter by some other means, or you'd like to find out more about HCSNet, visit our website at www.hcsnet.edu.au. For enquiries about this newsletter or to stop receiving it, please email newsletter@hcsnet.edu.au.