Description

Following on from the successful Designing the Australian National Corpus workshop held during SummerFest 2008, HCSNet (the ARC Research Network in Human Communication) is organising a workshop on Building the Australian National Corpus to be held as part of SummerFest 2009.

This workshop focuses on current developments and emerging possibilities in language data gathering and tools that might complement existing collections of language data in building the Australian National Corpus.

While sources like the World Wide Web have enormous potential there are numerous challenges facing those wishing to draw out linguistically relevant data from the Web. In constructing the Australian National Corpus, then, a wider range of data sources needs to be drawn upon. The aim of the workshop is thus to bring together researchers with expertise in corpus and web linguistics along with corpus building and annotation in a single forum in order to work towards strategies to capitalize on the potential for language data in existing as well as new collections to be incorporated into the Australian National Corpus in a principled manner.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Using the web as a source of corpus data
• Bringing existing data collections into the AusNC
• Making existing data useful in other fields of research
• Proposed models for collecting new data
• Legal issues for data collection and sharing
• Technical infrastructure and requirements
• Long term curation of the AusNC

There will be a keynote presentation by Prof. Gerhard Leitner from Frieie Universitat Berlin. Prof. Leitner is the author of the two volume book "Australia's Many Voices" (2004, Mouton de Gruyter), co-editor of "The habitat of Australia's Aboriginal Languages" (2007, Mouton de Gruyter) and "Language in Australia and New Zealand. A Bibliography and Research Database, 1788-present" (2006, 2008), and was also involved in the construction of the Indian English component of the International Corpus of English.

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: Monday 28th September 2009
• Notification of Acceptance: Monday 12th October 2009
• Registration: Closes Friday 6th November 2009
• Event Date: Thursday 3rd December 2009

Submission Format

Please submit an abstract of approximately 200-300 words.

Submission deadline: Monday 28th September 2009

Registration Information

Registration: Closes Friday 6th November 2009