Date: 22-Nov-2019 – 23-Nov-2019
Location: Bucharest, Romania
Contact Person: Cristina Vertan
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >
Linguistic Field(s): Text/Corpus Linguistics
Call Deadline: 20-Oct-2019
Meeting Description:
Call for Papers:
The workshop is part of the Annual Conference of the Department of Linguistics of the University of Bucharest. It is thematically devoted to uncertainty and vagueness in historical texts and aims at investigating computational models for modelling annotation and interpretation of vague and uncertain expressions.
Vagueness and uncertainty are described in theory (e.g. Pinkal 1980) and processed in various conceptual and technical environments (Zadeh 1965). Data in humanities (history, arts, literature, music etc.) are subject to interpretation of the researcher and therefore their possible or real vagueness must be kept for final resolution.
In historical texts – more than in modern texts – many vague and uncertain expressions are standard for describing events, attitudes or even factual data (v. Hahn 2015). Writing them into a standard data base or annotate them with common mark-up languages (e.g. XML) would distort the entries, because its later processing in inferences will treat them exclusively as true facts.
Vagueness has several sources: either porosity of language or imprecision at expression’s borders, inexactity, one or multidimensional relativeness. It differs from ambiguity which is due to several natural language features like: Homonymy, polysemy, syntactical ambiguity, multiple referential meaning, and dual metaphorical meaning.
Vagueness is related more to the conceptual backbone of the language, while ambiguity relates to words and terms. Vagueness can be preserves across languages, while ambiguity can be present in just one language.
Computer linguistics concentrates often more on ambiguity, by means of resources like WordNet. Vagueness detection is in strict correlation with conceptual modelling of the text. In the current proposal we will investigate to which extent vagueness influence the hermeneutic interpretation of historical sources. However, translation can be often of source of transforming ambiguous expression in source language in vague expressions in the target language, especially if the knowledge base is reduced and the source and the target language belong to different language families.
Literature:
(v. Hahn 2015) v.Hahn, Walther, 2015 Preserving Vagueness: The Central Mission of Next Generation Digital Humanities. (Dimitrie Cantemir, History of Moldavia). Charles university of Prague. (http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/events/seminar-35th-anniversary-cooperation-between-charles-university-prague-and-hamburg-university)
(Pinkal 1980) Pinkal, Manfred, Semantische Vagheit: Phänomene und Theorien. In: Linguistische Berichte 70. 1980. 1-26. und 72. 1981. 1-26.
(Zadeh 1975) Zadeh, L.otfi, The concept of a linguistic variable and its application to approximate reasoning–I, Inform. Sci., v. 8, pp. 199–249
Call for Papers:
We invite submissions for 30 (20+10) minute long oral presentations dealing with innovative, original contributions related, but not limited, to:
– Linguistic models for vagueness and uncertainty.
– Automatic detection of vague expressions
– Models for uncertain information
– Annotation frameworks for vagueness and uncertainty
– Knowledge representation of vague information
– Visualisation of vague and uncertain information
– Translation of vague and uncertain expressions
Submissions should be sent by attachment, as anonymous pdfs, to cristina.vertanuni-hamburg.de (Cristina Vertan), accompanied by a file containing the title of the paper, the authors and their affiliation. Submissions must be no longer than two single-spaced pages, in Times New Roman 12, including references and examples.
Workshop language: English.
Important dates for submission
– Deadline for submissions: October 20, 2019
– Notification of acceptance: October 25, 2019