UPCOMING EVENTS

SIG for Language & Speech Technology Development

2 nd CALL FOR PAPERS April 2007  

Special Track for Human Language Technologies (HLT)

A Special Track for Human Language Technologies (HLT) is being organised by the ALASA Special Interest Group for Language and Speech Technology Development, to run in parallel with the
14th International Conference of the African Language Association
of Southern Africa.

Dates : 9 - 11 July 2007
Venue: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth
Theme: HLT research in South Africa: towards sustainable development*

 *Due to practical reasons, only papers specifically focussing on languages spoken in Africa will be considered.

Sub-themes:

a) Resource development
b) Speech processing
c) Text processing
d) HLT applications

 Important Extended Dates:

30 April 2007 - Submission of abstract and summary
15 May 2007 - Notification of acceptance
Time allocated to each presentation: 20 min plus 10 min discussion

 Purpose of Special Track:
• to bring together the growing Human Language Technologies (HLT)
community in South Africa and encourage interactions;
• to encourage dissemination of results;
• to foster interaction between academic and industrial research;
• to provide a forum for discussion of new research and
students research;
• to increase visibility of HLT research in South Africa.

Submission of abstracts and summaries:
Abstracts and summaries should be submitted by e-mail as an MS Word file attachment in accordance with the following guidelines:
• Author’s title, surname and first name
• Institutional affiliation
• E-mail address
• Telephone and/or fax numbers
• Title of the paper
• An abstract of the paper of approximately 100 words
• A summary of the paper of approximately 500 – 800 words (excluding the “References”), stating the research questions and aims, the theoretical approach and the main findings of the paper.

• Please submit your abstract and summary to: boschse@unisa.ac.za

• An acknowledgement of receipt of your submission should reach you within three days. If this is not the case, please enquire as soon as possible.

 Submission of Papers:

Authors may submit their papers for publication in the South African Journal of African Languages as individual contributions. Instructions to authors are obtainable from Prof. Albert Kotze kotzeae@unisa.ac.za

Registration details and other information:

Should you require more information regarding registration and accommodation, please respond to the ALASA Conference Secretariat:

Mrs Yolande Ferreira yolande.ferreira@nmmu.ac.za

Tel: +27 41 504 2187 Fax: +27 41 5049353

More information will also be available on the website soon.

http://www.alasa.org.za/sig

See also: http://www.meraka.org.za/nhn

Special Track Organisers:

Justus Roux

Stellenbosch University Centre for Language and Speech Technology

jcr@sun.ac.za

Sonja Bosch

University of South Africa

boschse@unisa.ac.za

Danie Prinsloo

University of Pretoria

PAST EVENTS

Special Track for Human Language Technologies (HLT)
organised by the ALASA Special Interest Group for Language and Speech
Technology Development, to run in parallel with the first two days of the
13th International Conference of the African Language Association
of Southern Africa,

Dates: 4 and 5 July 2005
Venue: University of Johannesburg
Theme: Embarking on HLT development in the South African context.*

*Due to practical reasons, only papers specifically focussing on languages spoken in Africa will be considered.

Sub-themes: a) Resource development
b) Speech processing
c) Text processing
d) HLT applications

Important Dates: 28 February 2005 - Submission of abstract and summary
30 March 2005 - Notification of acceptance
31 May 2005 - Submission of full papers
Time allocated to each presentation: 20 min plus 10 min discussion

Organisers: Justus Roux (jcr@sun.ac.za)
Sonja Bosch (boschse@unisa.ac.za)

Scientific committee:
Sonja Bosch (University of South Africa)
Marelie Davel (CSIR)
Mbulelo Jokweni (Department of Arts and Culture)
Thomas Niesler (University of Stellenbosch)
Laurette Pretorius (University of South Africa)
Danie Prinsloo (University of Pretoria)
Justus Roux (University of Stellenbosch)
Gerhard van Huyssteen (North West University)

Purpose of Special Track:
• to bring together the growing Human Language Technologies (HLT)
community in South Africa and encourage interactions;
• to encourage dissemination of results;
• to foster interaction between academic and industrial research;
• to provide a forum for discussion of new research and
students research;
• to increase visibility of HLT research in South Africa.

Submission of abstracts and summaries
Abstracts and summaries should be submitted by e-mail as an MS Word file attachment in accordance with the following guidelines:
• Author’s title, surname and first name
• Institutional affiliation
• E-mail address
• Telephone and/or fax numbers
• Title of the paper
• An abstract of the paper of approximately 100 words
• A summary of the paper of approximately 800 – 1000 words (excluding the “References”), stating the research questions and aims, the theoretical approach and the main findings of the paper.

Please submit your abstract and summary to:
boschse@unisa.ac.za
An acknowledgement of receipt of your submission should reach you within three days. If this is not the case, please enquire as soon as possible.

Submission of Papers

Abstracts and summaries submitted for the Special Track for HLT will be reviewed by a scientific committee, and after having been accepted, full papers (of approximately 12 pages) will need to be submitted by 31 May 2005. After notification of acceptance, the Instructions to Authors will be forwarded to you. Authors will, however, still have an opportunity after the Conference to update their papers before final review by the scientific committee and submission to a special edition of the South African Journal of African Languages.

Registration details and other information

Should you require more information, please respond to boschse@unisa.ac.za
so that your name and contact address may be added to the ALASA conference address list.

COMPUTATIONAL MORPHOLOGY WORKSHOP
DATES: 20 TO 23 SEPTEMBER 2004
VENUE: MAIN CAMPUS, UNISA, PRETORIA
PRESENTER: DR KEN BEESLEY (Principal Scientist & Computational Linguist, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France) (http://www.xrce.xerox.com/people/beesley.html)SPONSORED BY: BYTES DOCUMENT SOLUTIONS (Xerox Authorised Distributor)
http://www.bytesdocumentsolutions.co.zaDuring this workshop participants were instructed hands-on in the use of Xerox Finite-state tools and techniques to build useful and efficient programs that process text in natural languages. The emphasis was on the indigenous languages of South Africa.
The workshop formed part of the SIG Capacity Building Project which is aimed, among others at the development of morphological analysers for all the African languages of South Africa, as part of the basic language resources kit. The development of the Zulu (isiZulu); Northern Sotho (Sesotho sa Leboa) and Xhosa (isiXhosa) analysers is well under way, while development work for the Ndebele (isiNdebele) and Tswana (Setswana) analysers has already begun, following Workshops 1 and 2 of the project. Further participants or teams that have an interest in the development of analysers for languages such as Southern Sotho (Sesotho), Tsonga (Xitsonga), Venda (TshiVenda), Swati (siSwati) or other African languages are most welcome to contact boschse@unisa.ac.za.
COURSE MANUAL
The course manual, including the applicable software, that was used during the workshop was:
Beesley, K.R. & Karttunen, L. (2003). Finite-State Morphology. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. ISBN 1-57586-434-7
For more information on the above publication, consult: http://www.fsmbook.com/
The publication may be ordered from:
http://www.amazon.com

After purchasing the book, participants should contact Lauri Karttunen at karttunen@parc.com to get the latest updates of the finite state code. These updates correct a few bugs and eliminate some infelicities. The updates also handle Unicode much better.

WORKSHOP ON STANDARDS FOR LANGUAGE RESOURCES
16 & 17 March 2004
University of South Africa, Pretoria
PROGRAMME
Session 1: Introduction to the ISO context on language resource management
Overview of ISO TC 37/SC 4, current activities, background on the work achieved with ISO 16642 (TMF)
Discussion: Applicability of the activities of ISO TC 37/SC 4 to the South African context
Session 2: Morpho-syntactic annotation
General principles of morpho-syntactic tagging. Current work: the MAF
(Morpho-syntactic Annotation Framework, ISO WD 24611) model.
Discussion/work: Short presentations on existing practices regarding morpho-syntactic annotation in South African languages (existing tagsets, existing taggers, existing documentation).
Session 3: Data categories
Introduction to the main ideas behind the deployment of a Data
Category Registry for ISO TC 37
Presentation of the on-line tools for managing data categories
Hands-on session on describing data categories
Discussion: Possible contributions to the DCR from a South African perspective
Session 4: Lexica
Current status of activities within SC 4 with the LMF (Lexical Markup
Framework), as discussed in early February 2004: global model,
application to the description of a morphological lexicon
Working session: Short presentations by participants on their own lexical data, their problems etc.
Conclusion: The way forward – Justus Roux (Chairman, STANSA TC 37)
PRESENTERS
Laurent Romary
Laurent Romary obtained his PhD in computational linguistics in 1989 and completed his Habilitation thesis in 1999. He is currently senior researcher at INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique), France. He leads the Langue et Dialogue team (http://www.loria.fr/equipes/led/) at
Loria laboratory and has conducted various research activities on man-machine dialogue, multilingual document management and linguistic engineering. His has participated in numerous national and international projects related to the representation and dissemination of language resources and on man-machine interaction, and in particular coordinated the MLIS/DHYDRO and IST/MIAMM projects. He has been the editor of ISO 16642 (TMF – Terminological Markup Framework) under TC37/SC3, and is the Chairman of ISO Committee (TC37/SC4) on Language Resource Management.
Philippe Sebire
Philippe Sebire, who is also affiliated to INRIA, is an engineer supervising the development of the tools that are being put together for the management of data categories in ISO TC 37. He manages a team which develops tools for management of a data category registry (in relation with ISO12620 and ISO16642) and for submitting new data categories in a ISO process. Philippe Sebire's visit is sponsored by INRIA.
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ALASA-SIG & AST 2003 WORKSHOP
Human Language Technologies: Research and Practice
7- 8 July 2003
Stellenbosch, South Africa
PROGRAMME
OUTLINE AND SCOPE OF HLTS
Justus Roux, African Speech Technology Project
HLT Research and Development in South Africa
Etienne Barnard, University of Pretoria
Marelie Davel, CSIR
Human language technologies in the developing world
LANGUAGE AND SPEECH RESOURCES
Pippa Louw, African Speech Technology Project
Annotating the AST Speech Databases: Practise makes Perfect
DEVELOPMENT OF BASIC LANGUAGE RESOURCES
Jackie Jones, Laurette Pretorius and Sonja Bosch, University of South Africa
Towards a machine-readable Xhosa lexicon using XML
Sonja Bosch and Laurette Pretorius, University of South Africa
Development and application of a Zulu XML lexicon
RESEARCH PROJECT REPORTS: COMPUTATIONAL MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
Winston Anderson, Albert Kotze & Petro du Preez, University of South Africa
A finite-state transducer for phonologically induced palatalisation: evaluating
Two approaches to labial palatalisation in Northern Sotho
Axel Fleisch, Reneé Fourie
Project “Finite State Morphological Analyser Ndebele"
Arvi Hurskainen, University of Helsinki
Louis Louwrens & George Poulos, University of South Africa
Disjoining writing as a computational problem
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LANGUAGE & SPEECH TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT COLLOQUIUM
HLT in South Africa – development and implementation
15 October 2002
Venue: University of Stellenbosch

PROGRAMME
Justus Roux (African Speech Technology Project)
The development and implementation of Human Language Technologies (HLT) in South Africa
Ken Beesley (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble)
Finite-state morphological analysis and minority languages
Sonja Bosch (University of South Africa)
Computational morphological analysis in the context of African languages