Linguistics in Belgium

This international congress is a joint initiative of the Research Group CROS of the Department of Spanish and Comparative Romance Linguistics at Ghent University (Belgium) and the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies (Spanish language) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) http://www.cros.ugent.be/ .

The congress will take place at Het Pand (Ghent, Belgium) on 5-6 February, 2019.

Plenary speakers:

Linguistics: Kim Potowski (University of Illinois)
Literary Studies: An Van Hecke (KU Leuven, Antwerpen)
Cultural Studies: Silvia Betti (Università di Bologna)

Program:

A detailed conference program can be consulted on http://www.cros.ugent.be/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/141219_timetable_CROS.pdf

Registration is now open, see: http://www.cros.ugent.be/en/cros-2019-conference/

22-Nov-2018 – 23-Nov-2018, Ghent, Belgium

With the rise of digital business communication, end-users of products and services can now easily communicate positive and negative feedback to other customers and organizations on social networking and (micro)blogging sites, the sheer amount of which is hard for corporations to monitor, let alone respond to. As negative word-of-mouth on both the issue at hand and the way it has been tackled may have detrimental consequences in terms of reputation and sales (Luo 2009), organizations now have to access these social platforms as well and engage in a very delicate type of online service encounter (i.e. webcare) with the prime intention of nursing customer relationships and monitoring reputation management (Van Noort and Willemsen 2011). The success of this type of interaction depends on many different aspects, including the linguistic realization of both the original message by the customer and the ensuing webcare itself. However, context-specific knowledge on what constitutes the most appropriate, effective communicative strategies during critical moments – both from the customers’ and the companies’ perspective – is lacking (Lee and Song 2010) or proves to be somewhat contradictory.

As organizers of this symposium, we believe that research into the communicative challenges of digital business communication would greatly benefit from an interdisciplinary approach, combining theories and methods from linguistics, service-oriented marketing and public relations (see also Holmqvist et al. 2017; Carnevale et al. 2017). Therefore, this symposium aims to bring together scholars in language, communication and marketing studies who all share an interest in the linguistic and communicative intricacies of online service management. We invite papers focusing on consumer reviews, complaints, webcare and/or crisis communication from different theoretical and methodological perspectives.

We invited five speakers with an expertise in discourse- and communication-related approaches to online consumer complaints, reviews, and webcare: Camilla Vasquez (University of South Florida), Valerie Creelman (Saint Mary’s University), Guda Van Noort (University of Amsterdam), Rob Le Pair (Radboud University Nijmegen), An-Sofie Claeys (University of Leuven).

We ask scholars attending the conference (except for BA and MA students) to pay a registration fee of 100€ (excluding dinner on November 22).

For further information please contact sofie.decock@ugent.be, bernard.declerck@ugent.be and/or rebecca.vanherck@ugent.be.

Program:

The program can be found on: http://www.webcare2018.ugent.be/programme/

Dear colleague,

We are pleased to announce you that the registration for CogLing8 is now open. We kindly request you to register before 15 November through the following link (also available via the conference’s webpage): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdlEROqzjyA44yVDQB7pQxTD60cNFJwlN0y8A-UNmgh3GQxrQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

A provisional programme is now available on the conference website https://cogling2018.wordpress.com/

It is still possible to book a hotel room at the university rate via the link provided on our website https://cogling2018.wordpress.com/travel-and-accommodation/. Please note that it is compulsory to use the link and form mentioned on this page in order to obtain the university rate. A limited number of rooms is available in both hotels (please note that the offer for the Ibis hotel is valid only for bookings made before 12 November). Our website also includes a link to other accommodation options in the numerous B&Bs in Louvain-la-Neuve, as well as travel information.

Kind regards,

The organizing committee

Barbara De Cock, Liesbeth Degand, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Sara Jonkers, Julien Perrez, Kristel Van Goethem

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, August 2019

The Linguistics Research Unit of the Institute of Language and Communication (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) will be hosting two 30-hour bootcamps by Stefan Gries next summer.

The ‘Corpus Linguistics with R’ bootcamp (12-16 Aug 2019) is a hands-on introduction to using the programming language R for the analysis of textual data (mostly corpora, but theoretically also literary works, web data, etc.). It is based on the second edition (2016) of Gries’s textbook Quantitative corpus linguistics with R and introduces a variety of programming constructs required for text processing and corpus exploration including

• building word frequency lists and computing type-token ratios;
• computing dispersion and key words statistics;
• extracting concordance lines.

For that, we will discuss different relevant functions and data structures, control flow structures such as loops and conditionals, and a sizable number of regular expressions; in addition and time permitting, we will also cover very elementary basics of data visualization. The kinds of data dealt with in this course come from a variety of differently formatted/annotated corpora and will also include 1-2 examples of literary works and/or XML processing.

The ‘Statistics for linguistics with R’ bootcamp (19-23 Aug 2019) is a hands-on introduction to statistical methods for both graduate students and seasoned researchers and is based on the second edition (2013) of Gries’s textbook Statistics for linguistics with R. The course is intended for linguists who already have a basic knowledge in statistics and some experience using R, and who wish to improve their proficiency in statistical analysis of linguistic data. Using the open source software and programming language R, we will:

• briefly recap basic aspects of statistical evaluation as well as several descriptive statistics;
• briefly discuss a selection of monofactorial statistical tests for frequencies, means, correlations and how they constitute special (limiting) cases of regression methods;
• explore different kinds of multifactorial and multivariate methods, in particular different kinds of regression approaches (fixed-effects only and mixed-effect modelling) as well as classification trees and random forests.

Details about the previous edition of the ‘Statistics for linguistics with R’ bootcamp in LLN are available at: https://uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/ilc/cecl/rling2017.html. For info about the prerequisites, visit https://uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/ilc/cecl/prerequisites.html.

The website of the two events will be online in early 2019 and online registration will start on 1 March 2019. It will be possible to register for one event only but priority will be given to people who register for both. The number of participants is limited. If you would like to participate, mark the date in your diary!

Contact email: magali.paquot@uclouvain.be

Magali Paquot
Convenor

October 15-16, 2018, Mons, Belgium

Co-organized by:

NUMEDIART Institute, University of Mons
LANGUAGE Institute, University of Mons
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice (IRDTA), Brussels/London

Website: http://slsp2018.irdta.eu/

Program:

Monday, October 15

09:00 – 09:30 Registration

09:30 – 09:40 Opening

09:40 – 10:30 Thomas Hain. Crossing Domains in Automatic Speech Recognition – Invited lecture

10:30 – 11:00 Break

11:00 – 12:15

Amal Houidhek, Vincent Colotte, Zied Mnasri and Denis Jouvet. DNN-based Speech Synthesis for Arabic: Modelling and Evaluation

Antoine Perquin, Gwénolé Lecorvé, Damien Lolive and Laurent Amsaleg. Phone-level Embeddings for Unit Selection Speech Synthesis

Raheel Qader, Gwénolé Lecorvé, Damien Lolive and Pascale Sébillot. Disfluency Insertion for Spontaneous TTS: Formalization and Proof of Concept

12:15 – 13:45 Lunch

13:45 – 14:35 Simon King. Does ‘End-to-End’ Speech Synthesis Make any Sense? – Invited lecture

14:35 – 14:50 Break

14:50 – 16:05

George Christodoulides. Forced Alignment of the Phonologie du Français Contemporain Corpus

Ruei Hung Alex Lee and Jyh-Shing Roger Jang. A Syllable Structure Approach to Spoken Language Recognition

Gueorgui Pironkov, Sean Wood, Stéphane Dupont and Thierry Dutoit. Investigating a Hybrid Learning Approach for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition

16:05 – 16:20 Break

16:20 – 17:30 Poster session I

17:30 – 19:30 Touristic visit

Tuesday, October 16

09:00 – 09:50 Isabel Trancoso. Analysing Speech for Clinical Applications – Invited lecture

09:50 – 10:20 Break

10:20 – 11:35

Jan Vanek, Josef Michalek, Jan Zelinka and Josef Psutka. A Comparison of Adaptation Techniques and Recurrent Neural Network Architectures

Andris Varavs and Askars Salimbajevs. Restoring Punctuation and Capitalization Using Transformer Models

David Awad, Caroline Sabty, Mohamed Elmahdy and Slim Abdennadher. Arabic Name Entity Recognition Using Deep Learning

11:35 – 11:50 Break and Group photo

11:50 – 13:05

Pratik Doshi and Wlodek Zadrozny. Movie Genre Detection Using Topological Data Analysis and Simple Discourse Features

Daniel Grießhaber, Thang Vu and Johannes Maucher. Low-resource Text Classification Using Domain-adversarial Learning

Manny Rayner, Johanna Gerlach, Pierrette Bouillon, Nikolaos Tsourakis and Hervé Spechbach. Handling Ellipsis in a Spoken Medical Phraselator

13:05 – 14:35 Lunch

14:35 – 15:50

Laura García-Sardiña, Manex Serras and Arantza Del Pozo. Knowledge Transfer for Active Learning in Textual Anonymisation

Fernando Gomes and Juan Manuel Adán-Coello. Studying the Effects of Text Preprocessing and Ensemble Methods on Sentiment Analysis of Brazilian Portuguese Tweets

Daniel Lichtblau and Catalin Stoean. Text Documents Encoding through Images for Authorship Attribution

15:50 – 16:05 Break

16:05 – 17:05 Poster session II

17:05 – 17:15 Closing

20-21 September 2018
University of Liège, Belgium

Dear colleagues,

Our research unit ‘Langues et Lettres’ proudly presents the international conference on “Failing Identities: Identification and Resistance”, which will take place in Liège 20-21 September 2018. The conference programme can be viewed at https://failingidentities2018.wordpress.com/conference-programme/.

Registration for the conference is still open at https://failingidentities2018.wordpress.com/registration/, and will close 12
September 2018.
More information is available at the conference website at https://failingidentities2018.wordpress.com/.

Looking forward to seeing you there,
On behalf on the organizing committee,
An Van linden

10-Dec-2018 – 11-Dec-2018, Brussels, Belgium

CRISSP is proud to present the eleventh installment of the Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL), devoted to the syntax and semantics of aspect.

We are pleased to announce that the following invited speakers have agreed to give a talk at BCGL 11:

Berit Gehrke (Humboldt Universität, Berlin)
Roumyana Pancheva (University of Southern California)
Gillian Ramchand (The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø)

Workshop Description:

The properties and representations of aspect have been studied extensively from both syntactic and semantic perspectives, as well as their interfaces. As for the syntax, a central question is how aspectual notions such as telicity, duration, cause and change are represented in syntax. Approaches range from the minimalist structure of Erteschik-shir & Rapoport (2005), to a more fine-grained functional structure as proposed by Ramchand (2008), or with a clear differentiation between outer (external, presentational) and inner (internal, Aktionsart) aspect, as proposed by Travis (2010). The semantics of aspect has also been widely studied. As in the syntax, a distinction is often made between outer and inner aspect, with tense scoping over grammatical (outer) aspect, and grammatical aspect scoping over aspectual class (inner aspect). This layered structure makes it possible to investigate (cross-linguistic variation in) the interaction between the lexical features of the verb, the semantics of the predicate-argument structure, the expression of progressive and perfective/imperfective aspect, and other elements in the sentence which can carry aspectual information (e.g. certain adverbs/adverbial phrases, negation). The aim of this workshop is to explore these and related issues.

2nd Call for Papers:

The submission deadline for abstracts is September 15, 2018.

Abstract Guidelines:

Abstracts should not exceed two pages, including data, references and diagrams. Abstracts should be typed in at least 11-point font, with one-inch margins (letter-size; 8½ inch by 11 inch or A4) and a maximum of 50 lines of text per page. Abstracts must be anonymous and submissions are limited to 2 per author, at least one of which is co-authored. Only electronic submissions will be accepted.

Please submit your abstract using the EasyChair link for BCGL11: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bcgl11

Web Site: http://www.crissp.be/bcgl-11-first-call-for-papers/