FSMNLP 2008 CFP

FSMNLP 2008 (Finite State Methods and Natural Language Processing) has issued their first Call for Papers (CFP). The deadline is May 11, 2008 and the conference will take place on September 11-12, 2008. Not the best time to be travelling perhaps, but this year it will be in Ispra, Lago Maggiore, Italy! That’s in the far north of Italy, right next to the Swiss border. From the pictures I’m finding on Google, it’s a gorgeous resort area.

The sorts of things they are interested in include:

• NLP applications and linguistic aspects of finite state methods
• Finite state models of language
• Practices for building lexical transducers for the world’s languages
• Specification and implementation of sets, relations, and multiplicities in NLP using finite state devices
• Machine learning of finite state models of natural language
• Finite state manipulation software

The special theme this year will be on high performance finite state systems in large scale NLP applications.

I am going to try really hard to get something together for it this year. I had a project last year that was potentially worth submitting, but I wasn’t able to get it done in time. Unfortunately, it has languished since then as other, more pressing matters have superceded it. Going to Northern Italy ought to be motivation enough, though, don’t you think?

The entire CFP is below the jump and is also available on their website:

Richard M. Hogg Prize in Linguistics

A couple months ago, I wrote about Richard Hogg dying. He was a professor at the University of Manchester who edited the Cambridge History of the English Language and did a lot of work on Old English morphology. I had corresponded with him briefly a few months before he died about a lab project on computational morphology. I was making a morphological analyzer for Old English verbs. I’m actually still working on it and generalizing it to the rest of the language. Anyhow, as I said before, he was a nice and helpful guy and it was a shame to see him go.

Now, the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) has set up a scholarship in his honor. Early career scholars who are members of ISLE (membership can be applied for at the time of submission) are eligible. Early career means you either haven’t gotten your PhD yet or got it within the past two years. Masters and undergraduate applicants are acceptable, but the expected entrant is a PhD candidate/recent recipient. The paper may be on any research-related topic in English or English linguistics and will be judged on originality and the contribution of its results. The prize is £500 and the submission deadline is March 31, 2008.

Old English Translator

Phil Barthram recently announced on the ENGLISC mailing list a new Old English translator. For those unfamiliar with Old English, this is not the really cheap malt liquor. This is the grandmother of Modern English (by way of its mother, Middle English and a few others, chiefly Norman French). Whereas an Olde English (the malt liquor) translator might look like this:

“You look pretty.”
“I’m trashed on cheap swill.”

an Old English (Anglo-Saxon) translator looks more like:

Nu sculon herigean heofonrıces weard
Now we should praise the guardian of the kingdom of heaven

This is the first line of Cædmon’s Hymn. Check out the wikipedia page for Cædmon to read the whole nine lines.

Richard Hogg dies

This past spring I worked on a morphological analyzer for Old English verbs. To my knowledge, this has never been done using finite state transducers. As part of my search to find the current state of the art for this language, I emailed Professor Richard Hogg at the University of Manchester. He wrote the section of the Cambridge History of the English Language on Old English morphology. A lot of times, you’ll email a professor and it could take days for them to get back to you, especially if they are at a different university. Sometimes they don’t respond at all. But, Dr. Hogg was a very polite and helpful guy, saying my work sounded interesting and pointing me to the Stella group at the University of Glasgow. His section on morphology in the Cambridge History was also very helpful, so I felt quite grateful to the guy. I wish I could have known him better.

Read his extensive obituary in the Guardian.