Workshop
Legacy of the Penn historical corpora
Legacy of the Penn historical corpora
To mark the occasion of the 25th edition of DiGS, we will kick off the conference with a one-day pre-conference workshop on the “Legacy of the Penn historical corpora” on the 25h of June, 2024. The use of the Penn corpora has featured prominently in the research of many members of the DiGS community, and over the years the number of corpora and tools to search them, as well as the layers of linguistic annotation have greatly expanded. The workshop will reflect on the history of the corpora originally created at the University of Pennsylvania, but also showcase new and novel ways of using the Penn format.
Invited speaker: Beatrice Santorini (University of Pennsylvania)
In this talk, I propose to present a timeline of the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCHE) and to discuss the various factors that contributed in a more or less direct way to the development of this resource. These include: the core team of contributors with their complementary strengths and weaknesses, the intellectual ecosystem in linguistics and computational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, the origins and development of that ecosystem, including the breakup of Bell Labs, with the resulting exodus of leading computational linguists to academia, and the Penn Treebank Project and related computational advances in a more speculative vein, the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism. I would also like to raise some outstanding issues, to be addressed, I hope, in collaboration with the DIGS community.
Call for papers
We invite abstracts for 30-minute presentations (followed by 10 minutes of questions) which focus on the use of the Penn(-based) corpora to answer formal diachronic syntactic questions. We particularly welcome talks on novel and innovotative methodologies to use and expand the corpora.
The workshop will also contain a lightning session (10 minutes demonstration + poster), in which new corpora and/or tools or resources can be demonstrated.
Abstracts are to be submitted in pdf-format via the EasyAbs system, at https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/DiGS25.
Abstracts should be anonymous and no longer than two A4 pages, including references and examples, in 12-point Times New Roman, with margins of at least 2,5 cm / 1 inch. Submissions for the entire event (lightning talks excluded) are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author.
The language of the conference is English.
Deadline for submission of abstracts: January 31, 2024.
Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2024.