Practical Applications in Language and Computers

PALC 2009 CONFERENCE

The Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at Łódź University is proud to announce that the 7th international conference on PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS IN LANGUAGE AND COMPUTERS (PALC 2009) will be held over 3 days, 6 to 8 April 2009 (arrival day 5 April) at the Lodz University Conference Centre in Lodz, Poland

For over a decade, the PALC conferences have served the international community of corpus linguists by providing a useful forum for the exchange of views and ideas on how corpora and computational tools can be effectively employed to explore and advance our understanding of language.

All information concerning the academic programme and social activities will be publicised as it becomes available. At the same time, we encourage and welcome proposals for special sessions, roundtable discussions and workshops.

TOPICS

The topics of the conference include, but are not limited to, the following:

Contrastive Studies and Language Corpora
Discourse and Language Corpora
ESP and Language Corpora
Expert, Retrieval and Analytical Systems
FLA/SLA and Language Corpora
Language Teaching Materials and Language (Learner) Corpora/ICT
Virtual Learning Environments
E-testing
Large (multilingual/multimodal) Corpora
Lexicography and Language Corpora
Cognition, Computers and Language
Computer Translation Tools
Machine Translation, Machine-aided Translation, Translation and Corpora
E-books and Corpora and Literature

WORKSHOP SESSIONS

Combinatorics (patterning) in specialized discourses (organized by Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski)
E-learning (organized by Jacek Waliński & Przemek Krakowian)
Exploring National and Reference Corpora (organized by Piotr Pęzik and Łukasz Dróżdż)

EXPLORING NATIONAL AND REFERENCE CORPORA

This special workshop session will bring together researchers involved in the development of reference and national corpora.
We welcome papers on a variety of topics related to the construction of large corpora:

Defining national and reference corpora, establishing quantitative and qualitative criteria
Ensuring representativeness, register sampling, text and genre typology, temporal criteria of representativeness
Collection of spoken data, transcribing, storing and serving spoken language data
Legal aspects of corpus compilation, dealing with intellectual property and copyrights
Levels and standards of annotation, ensuring interoperability
Data storage and exchange technology for reference corpora
Dissemination, development of essential corpus toolkits

We hope this workshop session will create a unique opportunity for corpus builders to share their expertise in the construction of national corpora.
Papers accepted for this session will be published as part of the Łódź Studies in Language series.

COMBINATORICS (PATTERNING) IN SPECIALIZED DISCOURSES

This workshop is intended to provide an informal forum for scholars interested in the phenomenon of ‘collocation’ (understood here in the broad sense of the co-occurrence of items at various levels not only the word level) in specialist discourse domains. We welcome contributions which deal with the following topics (the list is not exhaustive):

How domain-specific concepts and their relationships are expressed and encoded by means of patterns or phraseological items;
The scrutiny of various types of recurrent phrases (e.g. n-grams, lexical bundles) and their discoursal functions;
The relationship between specialized language and subject-specific domain (how the domain affects or even shapes specialized language);
The role of frequent recurrent phraseology in text-type discrimination (genre/register-specificity of such phrases);
Collocation and synonymy in LSP texts;
Connotation and semantic prosody in LSP texts

E-LEARNING

The ‘E-learning Theme Session’ is organized within the 7th international conference on Practical Applications in Language and Computers. The conference (see attached circular and call for papers) provides a convenient setting for presentations of innovative educational technology developments in the area of e-learning. We invite you to share online learning research and experiences with others in the field of e-education. The workshop focuses on the emergence of new technologies to research, develop and deliver online learning.

Suggested topics include (but are not restricted to):

Virtual Learning Environments
Distance/Online Education
CALL/CALT (Computer Assisted Language Learning/Teaching)
Online Collaboration Systems
Internet Authoring Tools
Multimedia
Validation of Online Courses
Software for Online Learning
Online Learning Tools and Techniques
Communications and Network Management

Other relevant topics are welcome.

One-page abstracts of submissions (including references) should be submitted using the ONLINE REGISTRATION FORM or sent to palc@uni.lodz.pl till 31 January, 2009. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 15 February 2007. Please, give your affiliation, postal address and phone/fax numbers. A selection of papers will be published by Peter Lang: Frankfurt a.Main.

CORPORA OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES

A special session on Slavic corpora will be held on 8 April 2009.

The idea of creating a special Slavic forum for the exchange of views and ideas on how to create, maintain corpora and employ them in linguistic research emerged during the corpus session of the last International Congress of Slavists in Ochrid. We would like to see our Łódź session as a step towards establishing such a forum on a regular basis.
The languages of this session are all Slavic languages as well as English.

The program includes:

Establishing quantitative and qualitative criteria of corpus representativness, the chronological structure of a corpus, the problem of representing poetry and translated literature
Practical and legal aspects of corpus compilation, attitude of newspapers and publishers to the national corpus
Levels and standards of annotation, including semantic annotation
Slavic morphology and corpus search programs
Desired users of our corpora, application in the teaching Slavic languages as foreign languages and in the lexicography
Parallel corpora of Slavic languages

Opening lecture

Vladimir A. Plungjan, the head of the Russian National Corpus, and František Čermak, head of the Institute of the Czech National Corpus, have accepted our invitation to open this session with a special lecture.

Abstracts and presentation

Abstracts of papers (in English and in the language of presentation) should be up to 500 words long and forwarded (by e-mail) to palc@uni.lodz.pl and M.Lazinski@uw.edu.pl. Deadline for submission is 31 January 2009. Presentations should last 30 minutes including demonstrations, questions and discussion. Selected papers accepted for this session will be published as part of the Łódź Studies in Language series.

Further information

The cost of participation in the Slavic session alone is 115 Euro (including 40 euro registration fee, one night accommodation, full board and conference dinner). For further information on this session, please contact: M.Lazinski@uw.edu.pl.

The session announcement is also available in Czech, Polish and Russian.

PLENARY SPEAKERS

The following scholars have accepted our invitation to address the conference as plenary speakers:

Khurshid Ahmad, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Mark Davies, Brigham Young University, Provo, USA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English (385+ Million Words, 1990-present): Past Challenges, Current Insights, and Future Developments)
Ken Hyland, University of London, UK
Terttu Nevalainen, University of Helsinki, Finland
Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Aston University, Birmingham, UK
Margaret Rogers, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

ABSTRACTS

Abstracts of papers should be up to 500 words long and forwarded (by e-mail) to the organisers (see below). Presentations should last 30 minutes including demonstrations, questions and discussion.

In response to many requests we agreed to extend the deadline until 31 January 2009.

We have also activated online registration forms as an alternative way of submitting abstracts.

REGISTRATION

All participants must register by filling out the REGISTRATION FORM.
After filling out the form a login password is sent to the user over email
Participants can then use their passwords to UPDATE registration details and edit previously submitted abstracts or add new ones.

PROCEEDINGS

A selection of conference papers will be published with the Peter Lang as part of the Łódź Studies in Language series. Deadline for the submission of papers is 1 July 2009.

COST

The cost of conference registration is 200 euros ( 170 euros on or before 15 February). This includes a conference pack, coffee breaks and participation in sessions.
Participants can book subsidised accommodation at the Lodz University Conference Centre complex, where the conference will be held (http://www.csk.uni.lodz.pl/). A conference package is available (including registration fee, accommodation [3 nights], full board and conference dinner) at 470 euros. Please, note that all accommodation bookings at the conference centre are handled by the organizers and the conference centre will not accept reservations coming directly from participants.

Alternative accommodation options can be found at http://www.hotel.lodz.pl/

We have got a limited number of bursaries for colleagues from low-GNP countries (including Poland) and full-time students. Please apply by emailing us at palc@uni.lodz.pl.

PAYMENT

Payment should be by bank transfer:

BANK: PKO S.A II O/Lodz
ACCOUNT No:14124030281111001004347782
IBAN: PL14124030281111001004347782
SWIFT: PKO PPL PW

Alternatively, cash or cheque payment can be made on arrival. This will incur an additional charge of 25 Euros. We regret that neither checques nor credit cards can be handled.

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstracts due: 31 January 2009
Notification of acceptance 15 February 2009
Early bird registration ends 15 February, 2009
Submission of conference papers 1 July 2009

PALC 2009 ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Prof dr hab. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
Dr Stanisław Góźdź-Roszkowski
Dr Krzysztof Kredens
Dr Jacek Waliński
Mr Łukasz Dróżdż
Ms Anna Kamińska
Dr Piotr Pęzik
Mr Mikołaj Deckert
Dr Marek Łaziński (co-organizer of the Session on Slavic Corpora)

CONTACT DETAILS

e-mail: palc@uni.lodz.pl

For further contact information CLICK HERE

FURTHER INFORMATION

Further information will be published regularly on this site (see news - palc.ia.uni.lodz.pl), as well as in circulars sent to participants and academic institutions.

Official language of the conference will be English.