LFG BULLETIN
DECEMBER 2000
------------------------------
* LINGUISTICS IN THE NEWS *
---------------------------------
RULES GRAMMAR CHANGE
English Traditional Replaced to be New Syntax With
WASHINGTON, DC--The U.S. Grammar Guild Monday announced that no
more will traditional grammar rules English follow. Instead there will
a new form of organizing sentences be.
U.S. Grammar Guild according to, the new structure loosely on an
obscure 800-year-old, pre-medieval Anglo-Saxon syntax is based. The
syntax primarily verbs, verb clauses and adjectives at the end of
sentences placing involves. Results this often, to ears American, a
sentence backward appearing.
"Operating under we are, one major rule," said Joyce Watters,
president of the U.S. Grammar Guild. "Make English, want we, more
archaic and dignified sounding to be, as if every word coming from the
tongue of a centuries-old, mystical wizard, is."
Brief pause Watters made then a. "Know I, know I," said she.
"Confusing sounds it, but every American used to it soon will be."
At a press conference recent greeted warmly the new measure by
President Clinton was.
"No longer will we adhere to the dull, predictable structure of
our traditional grammar system. This nation will now begin speaking,
writing and listening to something fresh, exciting and different,"
said Clinton.
"Excuse me," added he pause long after a. "Meant I, the dull,
predictable system our traditional grammar of adhere to no longer will
we. Speaking, writing and listening to something fresh, exciting and
different will this nation now begin."
This week beginning, America across, all dictionaries,
thesauruses and any other books or objects with any sort of writing
upon it or in it revised to fit the new syntax will be. Libraries
assure people wish to that the transition promptly begin will, but
that patient people should be, as so much to change there is.
"Feel good it will make people to know for all these changes
that, librarians cold, crabby and as paranoid and overprotective of
their books and periodicals as ever remain will," said Yvonne Richter,
Director of the Library of Congress.
The enthusiasm of government officials despite, many Americans
about the new plan upset are. "Why in the world did they do this?" a
New Canaan, CT, insurance salesman, said Brent Pryce. "There's
absolutely no reason. It's utterly pointless and will cause total
chaos throughout the country, not to mention the fact that it will
cost billions of dollars to implement. And what's this U.S. Grammar
Guild, anyway? I've never heard of it."
When of this complaint informed, government officials that they
could not the man's words understand said, because of the strange,
unintelligible way of speaking he was.
[from the Onion: www.theonion.com, contributed by roving reporter
Kyle Wohlmut]
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* OTHER NEWS *
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Upcoming LFG Conferences:
-------------------------
- LFG2001, Hong Kong, June 25-27, 2001
Invited Speaker: Sam Mchombo
organizer: Adams Bodomo
email: lfg2001@hkusua.hku.hk
web page: http://www.hku.hk/linguist/research/LFG2001.html
More information below in form of the call for papers.
- LFG2002:
organizer: Stella Markantonatou (marks@ilsp.gr)
venue: Athens, Greece
Computational Linguistics Fall School in Konstanz
-------------------------------------------------
- 1st Fall School of the Computational Linguistics Section of the
German Linguistics Society (DGfS).
Place: Konstanz
Time: September 10-21, 2001
Courses:
Stefan Mueller (DFKI) and Jonas Kuhn (IMS Stuttgart)
Grammar Development in constraint-based Formalisms:
HPSG and LFG
Henning Reetz (Konstanz)
From the Speechsignal to the Word
Tibor Kiss (Bochum)
Perl for Linguists
Heike Zinsmeister and Sabine Schulte im Walde (IMS Stuttgart)
Statistical Methods in Grammar Development
Invited Speakers: Mary Dalrymple (Xerox PARC)
Louisa Sadler (Essex)
More information at:
http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/conferences/dgfs-cl00.html
Recent LFG Publications:
------------------------
(Please send us the citation for your recent publications to include
in the next issue; announcements of publicly available theses are
encouraged.)
THE LFG00 ON-LINE PROCEEDINGS ARE OUT:
http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/5/lfg00.html
The proceedings of the Berkeley Formal Grammar Conference Workshops
can also be accessed from this page.
We'd like to thank all of the contributors for getting together a nice
proceedings. A complete pdf file containing all the papers (with page
numbers) will be out soon.
OTHER RECENT LFG PUBLICATIONS:
BERMAN, Judith. 2000. Topics in Clausal Syntax of German. PhD thesis,
University of Stuttgart (http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~judith/)
BOD, Rens. 2000. An Improved Parser for Data-Oriented
Lexical-Functional Analysis. Proceedings ACL-2000, Hong Kong, China.
BOD, Rens. 2000. An Empirical Evaluation of LFG-DOP. Proceedings COLING-2000,
Saarbruecken, Germany.
BRESNAN, Joan. 2000. Lexical-Functional Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
CANCEDDA, Nicola and Christer SAMUELSSON. 2000. Experiments with
Corpus-based LFG-specialization. Proceedings ANLP-2000, Seattle,
Washington.
JOHNSON, Mark and Stefan RIEZLER. 2000. Exploiting Auxiliary
Distributions in Stochastic Unification-Based Grammars. In Proceedings
of the 1st Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association
for Computational Linguistics (ANLP-NAACL 2000). Seattle, WA.
RIEZLER, Stefan, Detlef PRESCHER, Jonas KUHN and Mark
JOHNSON. 2000. Lexicalized Stochastic Modeling of Constraint-Based
Grammars using Log-Linear Measures and EM Training. To appear in
Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL'00), Hong Kong.
As always, check out Joan Bresnan's webpage for more information and
links to recent (as yet unpublished) papers and other material:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/bresnan/unofficial-links.html
----------------
* LFG 2001 *
----------------
LFG2001
2001 INTERNATIONAL LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL
GRAMMAR CONFERENCE
25 June - 27 June 2001
The Department of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong
URL: http://www.hku.hk/linguist/research/LFG2001.html
Abstract submission receipt deadline: 15 February 2001
Submissions should be sent to the LFG Program Committee
(see addresses below)
The 6th International Lexical Functional Grammar Conference will be
held by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong
from Monday June 25 until Wednesday June 27, 2001.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
We are pleased to announce that Sam Mchombo will give an invited talk at
the conference.
SUBMISSIONS
The conference will primarily involve 30-minute talks, poster/system
presentations and workshops. Talks and poster presentations will focus
on results from completed as well as ongoing research, with an emphasis
on novel approaches, methods, ideas, and perspectives, whether
descriptive, theoretical, formal or computational. Presentations should
describe original, unpublished work.
POSTERS
This year we're going to encourage an active poster session. All
presenters will be invited to display posters and to have a chance to
chat in more detail with participants about their work. In addition we
will accept papers for poster presentation only.
WORKSHOPS
Workshops are a small group of talks (2-4) on a coherent topic that
can be expected to generate opposing views and discussion with the
broader audience. Participants to workshops are usually
invited. Workshop papers should be distributed in advance among
participants and participants should refer to each others approaches.
At this point in time, we welcome suggestions for workshops from
potential organisers or people with certain interests. Suggestions for
workshops should be sent to the local organizers at:
abbodomo@hkusua.hku.hk.
TIMETABLE
Deadline for receipt of talk submissions: 15 February 2001
Late deadline for poster-only submissions: 15 March 2001
Acceptances sent out: 31 March 2001
Conference: 25 June - 27 June 2001
SUBMISSION SPECIFICATIONS
Abstracts for talks must be received by February 15, 2001, while
poster-only abstracts will be accepted until March 15, 2001. All
abstracts should be sent to the program committee chairs at the address
given below. For workshops, further site information or offers of
organisational help, contact the local organisers at the address below.
Submissions should be in the form of abstracts only. In contrast to
previous years, we are not acccepting the submission of full papers.
Abstracts should be one A4 page in 10pt or larger type and
include a title. Omit name and affiliation, and obvious self
reference. A second page may be used for data, c-/f- and related
structures, and references.
Submissions should indicate whether they wish to be considered only as a
talk, as either a talk or a poster, or only as a poster/demonstration.
In the absence of specification, submissions will be considered for both
classes, and the program chairs may decide that certain submissions are
better as poster presentations than as read papers.
Abstracts may be submitted by email or by regular mail (or by
both means as a safety measure). Email submission is preferred.
Regular Mail:
Include:
- Eight copies of the abstract/paper.
- A card or cover sheet with the paper title, name(s) of the
author(s), affiliation, address, phone/fax number, e-mail address, and
whether the author(s) are students.
Email:
Include the paper title, name(s) of the author(s), address, phone/fax
number, email address, and whether the author(s) are students in the
body of your email message. Include or preferably attach your paper as
either a plain ASCII text, PDF, HTML, or postscript file. Postscript
files require special care to avoid problems: make sure your system is
set to include all fonts (or at least all but the standard 13); if using a
recent version of Word, make sure you click the printer Properties
button and then the Postscript tab, and there choose Optimize for
Portability; on all platforms make sure the system is not asking for a
particular paper size or other device-specific configuration. It is
your responsibility to send us a file that us and our reviewers can
print. You can often test this by trying to look at the file in a
screen previewer such as Ghostview.
All abstracts will be reviewed by at least three people.
Papers will appear in the proceedings, which will be published online
by CSLI Publications. Selected papers may also appear in a printed
volume published by CSLI Publications.
ORGANISERS AND THEIR CONTACT ADDRESSES
Send abstract submissions and inquiries about submissions to:
Program Committee Chairs:
Chris Manning <manning@csli.stanford.edu>
Rachel Nordlinger <r.nordlinger@linguistics.unimelb.edu.au>
Mail:
LFG2001
c/o Chris Manning
Linguistics Department
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2150
USA
Contact the local conference organisers at:
Email: abbodomo@hkusua.hku.hk
Mail: Adams Bodomo
Department of Linguistics,
The University of Hong Kong,
Pokfulam Road, HONG KONG
ALL OTHER INFORMATION including accommodation and registration
details will be included in a subsequent call for participation. Some
details are already posted on the conference website:
http://www.hku.hk/linguist/research/LFG2001.html
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* ILFGA *
-----------
If you haven't yet, you can still join ILFGA, the International
Lexical Functional Grammar Association by sending mail to:
majordomo@lists.stanford.edu with the message:
subscribe ilfga-members
In addition, please add yourself to the ILFGA linguist database.
To do so, send email to Chris Culy (culy@ai.sri.com) with the
following information:
NAME
AFFILIATION
OFFICIAL ADDRESS
EMAIL ADDRESS
WEB PAGE
RESEARCH INTERESTS
RESEARCH LANGUAGES
The database can be accessed at:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/ilfga/member-database/ilfga-namelist.html
-----------
* EDITORS *
-----------
Please send updates, suggestions and news for inclusion in the next
LFG Bulletin (March 2001) to:
miriam.butt@uni-konstanz.de
thking@parc.xerox.com
Most importantly, please send information about:
- your recent publications or papers
- publically available grammars
- current grammar development efforts
- recent dissertations
Thank you,
Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Frequently Asked Questions: FAQs
Information on the following topics is available on the LFG WebPages:
http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LFG/
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg
1. WHAT IS LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR?
2. WHAT ARE THE BEST INTRODUCTORY BOOKS/ARTICLES TO LFG?
3. THE LFG WWW SITE
4. THE LFG MAILING LIST
5. LFG BIBLIOGRAPHY, RECENT PUBLICATIONS IN LFG
6. HOW TO RETRIEVE LFG DOCUMENTS
7. PUBLICALLY AVAILABLE LFG SYSTEMS
8. CURRENT GRAMMAR DEVELOPMENT EFFORT
9. UPCOMING EVENTS
If you have access to ftp, but no access to Web, you can get a copy of
the FAQ by ftp or email (see "How to Retrieve LFG Documents" below).
Please help keep this document and the FAQ up to date!
Send updates and suggestions for improvements to the FAQ to
doug#essex.ac.uk.
Send updates, suggestions and news for inclusion in the LFG Bulletin
to miriam.butt@uni-konstanz.de or thking@parc.xerox.com, or post them
on the LFG list (LFG@listserv.linguistlist.org). Most importantly,
please send information about:
- your recent publications or papers
- publically available grammars
- current grammar development efforts
---
* HOW TO RETRIEVE LFG DOCUMENTS *
Some LFG documents are available on the web, by FTP, or by email.
There are three ways to get them.
(1) Most of the documents are accessible via the WWW:
The current version of the list of Frequently Asked Questions about LFG:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/lfg-information.html
Introductions to LFG:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/clwww.essex.ac.uk/LFG/Introductions.html
http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LFG/Introductions.html
The LFG bibliography:
http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/lfg/bibliography.html
http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LFG/Bibliography.html
The bibliography is also available at the CL/MT Group Bibliographic
Search Page, maintained by Doug Arnold of the University of Essex.
The URL is:
http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/search/
(2) You can get the documents by anonymous FTP from:
ftp ftp-lfg.stanford.edu
All of the documents are in subdirectories of the directory
/pub/lfg. Here is a list of some of the files in that directory that
are relevant for LFG researchers:
in the directory /pub/lfg/bibliography:
The LFG Bibliography in various versions and formats.
in the directory /pub/lfg/lfg-information:
FAQ [the latest version of the list of
Frequently Asked Questions about LFG]
in the directory /pub/lfg/lfg-introductions:
pracinstrucsforlfg.ps [an introduction to LFG notation by
Michael Wescoat]
formal-architecture.ps [an introduction to LFG by Ron Kaplan]
neidle.ps [an introduction to LFG by Carol Neidle]
sadler.ps [a paper on recent developments in LFG by
Louisa Sadler]
in the directory /pub/lfg/lfg-presentations:
Slides and handouts from LFG conferences and courses.
in the directory /pub/lfg/papers:
Papers that have been submitted to the LFG Archive.
Compressed versions of some of these files are also available.
The file names of the compressed versions are the same, except
they have ".gz" at the end. There may be other LFG-related files
in that directory as well, which you are welcome to retrieve.
(3) You can get some files by email, via the Listserv "get"
command. A list of currently available files can be obtained by
sending a message to
LISTSERV@listserv.linguistlist.org
(please note: address the message to LISTSERV, not LFG). The
message should contain the following command:
index lfg
The following files are available, and there may be additional files
as well:
LFG-bulletin.txt [the latest version of the LFG Bulletin]
FAQ.txt [the list of Frequently Asked Questions]
lfgbib.text [the LFG bibliography]
To get a file, send a message to LISTSERV@listserv.linguistlist.org
containing the following command:
get <filename>
For example, if you want to get the latest version of the FAQ, you
would send a message to LISTSERV@listserv.linguistlist.org with
the following command:
get FAQ.txt
You will receive the file in an email message.