CFP: UNL Grammar Workshop Series (A1) - Indian Chapter

[martins]

[Apologies for multiple postings]
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Call for Participation
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UNL GRAMMAR WORKSHOP SERIES - Indian Chapter (A1)
www.unlweb.net
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The UNDL Foundation invites applications for the Indian Chapter of the UNL Grammar Workshop – Level A1, to take place in the Indian Institute of Technology of Bombay (IIT-Bombay), from June 11th to June 15th, 2012. The workshop will be dedicated to the development of the grammatical resources for the processing of the following languages:

Assamese
Bengali
Bodo
Dogri
Gujarati
Hindi
Kannada
Kashmiri
Konkani
Maithili
Malayalam
Manipuri
Marathi
Nepali
Oriya
Punjabi
Sanskrit
Santhali
Sindhi
Tamil
Telugu
Urdu

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ACTIVITIES
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During the workshop the participants are expected to provide the dictionary entries and the morphological, syntactic and semantic modules of the grammar necessary to generate an experimental corpus of 50 sentences from UNL into their native language, and from their native language into UNL. The grammar is expected to comply with the formalism described at www.unlweb.net/wiki/index.php/Grammar_Specs, and will be provided through the UNLdev, a web-based integrated development environment for creating and editing dictionary entries and grammar rules for natural language processing. The UNDL Foundation will provide all the training and support necessary for the accomplishment of the tasks.
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REQUISITES
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Candidates must be fluent in any of the languages referred to above; should have an university degree in Linguistics, Computer Science or related field; should have been registered in the UNLweb; and should have been approved in CLEA250, CLEA450, CLEA700 and CUP500. These certificates may be pursued online at VALERIE – the Virtual Learning Environment for UNL – available at www.unlweb.net/valerie. Previous experience in natural language processing, respectable academic records and previous experience in any of the existing projects at the UNLweb (such as Le Petit Prince and UNL MIR) will also be valued.
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APPLICATION
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In order to apply, candidates must send a CV to r.martins@undlfoundation.org until May 1st, 2012.
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SELECTION
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The UNDL Foundation will select only one candidate per language, according to the following criteria:
Compliance with the requisites;
Strongest experience in natural language processing;
Strongest experience in the UNLweb;
Highest academic degree.
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PROGRAM AND VENUE
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The workshop will take 30 hours, from June 11th to June 15th, at the IIT/Mumbai, according to the tentative schedule below:
[June 11th] - Monday
09:00-10:00 Introduction
10:00-12:00 I – Corpus
14:00-17:00 II – UNL-NL dictionary
[June 12th] - Tuesday
09:00-12:00 III – Morphology (inflectional paradigms)
14:00-17:00 IV – NL dictionary
[June 13th] - Wednesday
09:00-12:00 V – UNL-NL grammar (I)
14:00-17:00 V – UNL-NL grammar (II)
[June 14th] - Thursday
09:00-12:00 VI – NL-UNL grammar (I)
14:00-17:00 VI – NL-UNL grammar (II)
[June 15th] - Friday
09:00-12:00 Evaluation
14:00-17:00 Discussion
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SUPPORT
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The UNDL Foundation will pay the travel and accommodation expenses for the selected candidates not living in Mumbai. These include:
a round-trip plane, bus or train ticket from/to Mumbai*
7 nights at a hotel in Mumbai*
7 per diem of Rs1,500.00 (total of Rs10,500.00).
*The UNDL Foundation will only pay travel expenses inside India. The hotel will be chosen, reserved and paid by the UNDL Foundation, so that all external participants will stay in the same place.
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CERTIFICATION
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The UNDL Foundation will issue a Certificate of Participation, upon evaluation, for all the participants.
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BONUS
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After the workshop, the participants will be invited to extend their experimental grammars (for both analysis and generation) for a reference corpus comprising 500 sentences. Those who accomplish this task before the deadline (October 1st, 2012) will receive an additional bonus of Rs25,000.00 (twenty-five thousand Rupees) and will be entitled to participate in the A2-level workshops.
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THE UNDL FOUNDATION
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The UNDL Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, which has received, from the United Nations, the mandate for implementing the Universal Networking Language (UNL). The UNL is an artificial language that has been used for several different tasks in natural language engineering, such as machine translation, multilingual document generation, summarization, information retrieval and semantic reasoning. It has been, since 1996, a unique initiative to reduce language barriers and strengthen cross-cultural communication in the framework of the UN.
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LOCAL COMMITTEE
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Pushpak Bhattacharya (IIT-Bombay)
pb@cse.ittb.ac.in
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FURTHER INFORMATION
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For further information, please contact:
Ronaldo Martins (UNDL Foundation)
r.martins@undlfoundation.org