Monthly Archives: July 2016

Conference on Computational Approaches to Linguistics?

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A group of us have recently been discussing the possibility of a new conference on computational approaches to linguistics (group=Rajesh Bhatt, Brian Dillon, Gaja Jarosz, Giorgio Magri, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Joe Pater, Brian Smith, and Kristine Yu). We’ll provide some of the content of that discussion in a moment (we=Gaja and Joe), but the main question we’d like to get on the table is where the first meeting of that conference should be held. It’s so far agreed that it should be co-located with some other event to increase participation (at least for the first meeting), and the end of 2017 / beginning 2018 seems like the right time to do it. The ideas currently under discussion are:

  1. In conjunction with the Annual Meeting on Phonology in New York in early fall 2017. (We haven’t approached the organizers about this).
  2. In conjunction with a one-time workshop on computational modeling of language planned for fall of 2017 at UMass (invited speakers, pending funding, include Jacob Andreas, Emily Bender, Sam Bowman, Chris Dyer, Jason Eisner, Bob Frank, Matt Goldrick, Sharon Goldwater, and Paul Smolensky).
  3. As a “Sister Society” at the LSA general meeting 4-7 January in Salt Lake City (we have had preliminary discussions with the LSA and this seems very straightforward)

We’d very much appreciate your thoughts on the location or the substance of the conference as comments below, or use this google form to give a non-public response.

The original idea was to start a computational phonology conference, inspired by the success of the informal meetings that we’ve had as the North East Computational Phonology Circle, and by the central place that computational work has in phonology these days. But Giorgio pointed out that a broader meeting might well be of interest, and we seem to have come to a consensus that he’s likely right. It doesn’t seem like there is a general venue for computational linguistics of the non-engineering-focused kind, though we are aware of successful workshops that have been held at the ACL and elsewhere (e.g. Sigmorphon, MOL, CMCL). These workshops are in fact also part of the inspiration for this; however, the conference we envision would be broader in scope and co-located with a major linguistics conference to attract as many linguists as possible, minimize costs, and minimize additional conference travel.

We still think that a core contingent might well be the computational phonologists, especially at first, so we still think co-locating it with AMP might make sense (plus NYC is a good location). We’ve also had suggestions that we might in some years co-locate with other conferences, like NELS – the location of future meetings is something we could discuss in person at the first one.

We also seem to have come to a current consensus that we’d like to have reviewed short papers in the CS / CogSci tradition. This is an extremely efficient way to get research out. The one worry that was expressed was that this may create a barrier to later journal publication, but at least two journals with explicit policies on this (Cognitive Science and Phonology) allow publication of elaborated versions of earlier published conference papers.

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