Språk og IKT i 7.RP

Informasjonsmøte om IKT-programmet i EUs 7. Rammeprogram for forskning

Studentsenteret (UiB) på Sem rom C, 12.06. 2012 fra 09.30 – 14.30.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) er det største særprogrammet innenfor EUs 7. Rammeprogram for forskning og teknologiutvikling. De siste utlysningene i ICT-programmet er for tiden under utforming og ventes publisert i juli 2012, med søknadsfrister i Januar og April 2013.

På dette informasjonsmøtet ønsker Forskningsrådets nasjonale kontaktpunkt (NCP) for ICT å gi en oversikt over temaer og utlysninger i arbeidsprogrammet for 2013. Spesiell vekt vil bli lagt på temaene som ligger i skjæringspunktet mellom teknologi og humaniora/samfunnsvitenskap som språkteknologi og semantisk teknologi, IKT for kreativitet og IKT for læring og utdanning.

Møtet skal innrettes tematisk mot HF (språkteknologi, digital kultur og kreativitet) og S-infomedia (eLæring), dvs Challenge 4 og 8 – men interesserte miljø innen informatikk er jo selvsagt velkomne.

Lecture on logometry and modals

Visiting scholar Marion Bendinelli will give a lecture on Tuesday June 12 at 10:15 in SH:G. This research focuses on the use of the modal and semi-modal auxiliaries in the American presidential debates, from 1960 (J.F. Kennedy vs. R. Nixon) to 2008 (B. Obama vs. J. McCain). The intent is to uncover the discourse strategies that the candidates use to establish and manage power relationships. The analyses are couched both in qualitative and quantitative theories, with an enunciative and pragmatic approach of speech turns and with a computer-based discourse analysis, namely Logometry and the software Hyperbase.

Ilja Seržants: PhD defense

On Thursday June 14, Ilja Seržants defends his PhD entitled Aspects of non-prototypical subjects; diachrony, synchrony and areality. The event will be at 9:30 in Sydneshaugen skole Aud. B.  The day before at 16:30 at the same location, he presents his trial lecture entitled Problems in the study of areal links between genetically related languages.

Friday Seminar: Aleksandrs Berdicevskis

Experimental modelling of the cultural evolution of language

HF-217, 14.15-16.00

The field of language evolution is relatively new, but has been developing very quickly during the last decades. The basic questions of this highly interdisciplinary field are: how did language emerge, how did it acquire the structure it has, and what are the most general patterns of its change. One of the promising approaches to the latter two questions is the cultural evolution framework which views language as a complex adaptive system. In other words, as language is transmitted over generations or used for communication, it evolves and adapts to environmental pressures. It is hypothesized that many properties of linguistic structure (including the fundamental ones such as compositionality, duality of patterning, recursive syntax etc.) can be explained as outcomes of this cultural evolution.

We have little opportunity to study cultural evolution by direct observation, so the approach has to rely heavily on models. Until recently, those were only computational and mathematical models, but a few years ago a powerful method of performing experiments with human subjects was introduced (Kirby et al. 2008). I will be speaking about most recent advances achieved using this method, including my own work.

Reference:

Kirby, S., Smith, K., and Cornish, H. (2008) Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: an experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(31), 10681–10686.

Appraising Case

Prosjektet IECASTP/NonCanCase inviterer til ei dugnadsgruppe Appraising Case, torsdagen 3. mai, kl. 9-17, HF 372. Inviterte gjester er Alice Harris (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Joan Maling (National Science Foundation) og Helge Lødrup (Universitetet i Oslo).

60-årsseminar for Johan Myking

Øivin Andersen, Torodd Kinn og Helge Sandøy organiserer 60-årsseminar for Johan Myking. Programmet starter kl. 13:00 på Dragefjellet, Seminarrom 2, og avslutter ca.kl. 17:00. Foredragsholdere er Heribert Picht, Jan Roald, Trude Bukve og Marita Kristiansen.

Visit from Bulgaria (2)

Prof Kiril Simov from the Linguistic Modelling Department, Institute for Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, is visiting us in Bergen in week 13.  He will give a seminar on Friday, March 30, at 14:15 on Language Resources and Technology for Bulgarian.