2nd Call for Abstracts: Towards a reference corpus of web genres

APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTINGS
---------------------------

2nd Call for Abstracts

Corpus Linguistics 2007 Colloquium:
Towards a reference corpus of web genres


COLLOQUIUM DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES

Genres of spoken and written texts are being intensively studied from various 
angles, e.g., communication studies, discourse analysis, computational 
linguistics, without arriving at a generally accepted definition. The web is 
new, so it is not clear how to apply traditional notions of genre to web pages. 
In this colloquium we would like collect submissions that study characteristics 
of web genres with respect to traditional paper genres represented in 
electronic corpora like the BNC.

Web documents are often characterised by a high level of genre hybridism, by a 
fragmentation of
textuality across several documents, by the impact of technical features such 
as hyperlinking, posting facilities and multi-authoring. The web is a huge 
reservoir of documents that can be easily mined for building all sorts of 
corpora with many collections being built according to subjective criteria for
corpus composition, genre annotation, genre representativeness and genre 
granularity. In this colloquium we would like to invite submissions 
contributing to a reference corpus of web genres. The main goal of the 
colloquium is to draw up an initial list of characteristics and requirements 
for building, annotating and evaluation reference corpora of web genres. For
instance:

* To what extent should genre hybridism and authorial creativity be represented 
in a genre collection? These two phenomena appear to be very  common on the web.

* To what extent is it possible to include "emerging genres", i.e., genres 
still in a transitional phase in genre evolution? The web is currently thriving 
with emerging genres.

* How many granularities of the unit of analysis should be included? Only 
genres representing web sites? Only genre representing web pages? Both? 

* What "format" should be used to store these units in a collection (e.g., a 
database-like form, DOM trees, a net of graphs, in HTML format, in a text-only 
version, with or without embedded images, removing boilerplate components)?

* What level of genre granularity and similarity should be applied in the 
reference corpus? Genre collections often show different levels of   
granularity, including genres and super-genres. Should similar genres, such as 
"tutorial" and "how-to", be accounted for separately?

TOPICS:

The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Text theory for the development of web corpora
- Modelling corpora of web genres
- Innovative genre classification schemes accounting for multi-genre and 
no-genre web documents
- Modelling genre annotation scheme for web documents (metadata organization)
- Assembling a list of web genres for a reference corpus
- Creating comparable corpora of web genre
- Automatic genre classification vs. human genre classification
- How to evaluate the corpus: using statistical measures, relying on corpus 
linguists, librarians, or web users?

PARTICIPATION

The aim of this colloquium, the first ever organized on this topic, is to bring 
together researchers from different communities such as corpus linguistics, 
genre analysis, digital genre community, computational linguistics, and 
information retrieval in order to promote the discussion and development of new 
ideas and methods to create new corpora for language
studies and as evaluation resources.

Send abstrats to: webgenres@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Please, specify "Colloquium Abstracts" in the subject line.

Abstract submissions should include:
     * Presenter contact information (mailing address, phone, e-mail & fax)
     * A paper proposal (250 word max)
     * An abstract for the program (50 word max)

The deadline for submissions is Dec 15, 2006
Notification of acceptance will be sent out by Jan 11, 2006

*LOCATION*:
The colloquium will take place in the UK at the end of July 2007. The venue and 
the exact date of the colloquium will be announced at the end of January 2007.

Colloquium Organization:

Marina Santini (University of Brighton, UK)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)

Program Committee:

Marco Baroni (University of Bologna, Italy)
Stefan Gries (University of California, USA)
Adam Kilgarriff (Lexmasterclass, UK)
Alexander Mehler (Bielefeld University, Germany)
Sven Meyer zu Eissen (University of Weimar, Germany)
John Paolillo (Indiana University, USA)
Paul Rayson (UCREL, Lancaster Uni, UK)
Georg Rehm (University of Tuebingen, Germany)
Marina Santini (University of Brighton, UK)
Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
Benno Stein (University of Weimar, Germany)

Contacts:
========
Main contact: Serge Sharoff (s.sharoff@xxxxxxxxxxx)
Other contact: Marina Santini (Marina.Santini@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)



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