Workshop on Computational Phonology
26 September 2007Borovets, Bulgaria
In conjunction with the 6th International Conference
Recent Advances on Natural
Language Processing
RANLP-2007
27-29 September 2007
Invited speaker
Grzegorz Kondrak (Alberta)Workshop motivation and aims
We propose a workshop on Computational Phonology to be held in conjunction with the 6th RANLP. The focus of work on computational phonology, which began in the 1970s is the study of the representations and processes needed to model the sound structure of natural languages, including e.g. the nature and status of phonotactic constraints, the mapping from lexical to surface structure (generation) as well as its reverse (parsing), the form and implementation of phonology rules, the modeling of phonological behavior, e.g. speech errors or the mappings between textual and phonological structures (grapheme-phoneme conversion), and phonological learning. Phonological and computational theories collaborate naturally in approaching all these various theoretical and practical tasks.Some of the outstanding work in this area has been working in the finite-state community (Koskenniemi, Kaplan & Kay, Beesley & Karttunen), work on modeling and implementing optimality theory (Van Noord & Gerdemann, Bíró), and work on learning phonology (Johnson 1984, Gildea and Jurafsky 1996, Tesar and Smolensky 2000, Boersma and Hayes 2001, Albright and Hayes, 2003).
In addition we encourage submissions from novel areas such as the study of phonological variation in dialectology and sociolinguistics, the study of phonological interference in interlanguage production and comprehension, and the study of sound changes in diachronic linguistics.
The Workshop's goals are as follows:
- bringing together researchers from various, but related backgrounds in computational phonology,
- organizing a discussion forum on the hot issues in a promising scientific area
- identifying prospects for further developments within computational phonolog