Invited Speaker

Mr. Adam Pease

Plenary Speakers

o                                Dr. Danilo T. Dayag

o                                Dr. Trevor Johnston

o                                Dr. Chungmin Lee

o                                Dr. Haizhou Li

o                                Dr. Patrick Saint-Dizier

o                                Dr. Sachiko Shudo

o                                Dr. Gary Simons

 

Invited Speaker

Mr. Adam Pease
Topic: Ontology

Adam Pease is the Principal Consultant and CEO of Articulate Software, a consulting firm based in the San Francisco area, specializing in ontology, formal reasoning and natural language understanding.  He and his colleagues provide development of custom ontologies based on open standards, including the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO).  His other projects are the Controlled English to Logic Translation (CELT) and the Sigma ontology environment. He is a frequent speaker on formal semantics and the author of numerous papers on formal ontology, logical inference and linguistics.  All of his work is released under open source licenses to encourage application and experimentation.

 

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Plenary Speakers

Dr. Chungmin Lee
Topic: Formal and Theoretical Linguistics

Prof. Chungmin Lee received his doctorate degree in linguistics at Indiana University.  He has been teaching Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Seoul National University since 1973 in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science Program of the University.  He also taught at UCLA (1986-88) and LSA Linguistic Institutes (UCSC-1991, UCSB - 2001, Michigan State - 2003).  He has published articles in leading journals in Linguistics including Language, Linguistic Inquiry, Foundations of Language, Language Sciences and so on.  He has worked on (in)definites, negative polarity, topic-focus, tense-aspect-modality, anaphora, argument structure, speech acts,  in semantics, syntax, pragmatics, language acquisition and natural language processing.  He served on the editorial board of Linguistics and Philosophy (1997-2003) and Journal of East Asian Linguistics (1999-2002, as area editor:1992-1998), and served as an Editor of Pragmatics (2001-2006), and is currently on the advisory editorial board of Journal of Pragmatics (2001-), on the special editorial board of The Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan (2001-), and editor-in chief of Journal of Cognitive Science (Seoul).

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Dr. Gary Simons
Topic: Language Documentation

Dr. Gray Simons is the Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), in Dallas, Texas.  He is also the executive editor of the SIL Ethnologue, which is an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages.  He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Linguistics at Cornell University.  He is currently an adjunct associate professor of Language Development, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, and an adjunct assistant professor of Linguistics, University of Texas at Arlington.  Dr. Simons research interests include Digital language documentation, description, and archiving; Markup languages and text encoding; Computational linguistics; Programming languages; Historical and comparative linguistics; and Austronesian linguistics.

 

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Dr. Haizhou Li
Topic: Digital Signal Processing

Dr. Haizhou Li is the Department Head for Human Language Technology of the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore.  He is also an adjunct Associate Professor of the School of Computer Engineering of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.   He received the B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D degrees in electrical & electronic engineering from the South China University of Technology (SCUT) in 1984, 1987 and 1990, respectively. Dr Li's current research interests include automatic speech recognition, speaker recognition, spoken language recognition, and natural language processing. He is a recipient of the National Infocomm Award 2001 and the TEC Innovator's Award 2004 in Singapore. He is now the Vice President of the COLIPS, and Executive Committee Member of Asian Federation of NLP.

 

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Dr. Patrick Saint-Dizier
Topic: Computational Lexical Semantics

Prof. Patrick Saint-Dizier is the head of the Informatique Linguistique et Programmation Logique (ILPL) at IRIT-CNRS in Toulouse, France.  He is a CNRS research director and he heads the computational linguistics and question-answering aspects of STIC-Asia, also called 'A Multilingual Processing of Language in a Lexico-Semantic Perspective: Application to Question-Answering'.

 

His main research interests are:

-          lexical semantics of predicative forms: verbs (Volem Project) and prepositions (PrepNet project), emphasizing a conceptual approach. Development of syntactic (subcat frames, alternations) and semantic representations (thematic structure, lexical conceptual structure representations, some pragmatic aspects).

-          text syntax and semantics, structure of rhetorical structures, application to the procedural text structure (TextCoop project), and also to the organization and the expression of explanations and argumentation in texts.

-          formal models for language processing: underspecification, types and lambda-calculus for semantic representation computation, type coercion and co-composition, Generative Lexicon.

-          application area: question-answering applied to how-to questions, cooperative response generation based on navigation tools

 

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Dr. Trevor Johnston
Topic: Sign Language Linguistics

Trevor Johnston is Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is regarded as a leading Australian researcher of Auslan (Australian Sign Language). He is the author of the first dictionary of Auslan of which there has now been three editions (in book, CD-ROM and Internet formats) and a number of papers describing the grammar of Auslan, signed language lexicography, and signed language transcription. He has had a considerable record of public and academic presentations in the field of sign linguistics, language policy, and professional development for teachers of Auslan. Trevor Johnston has also conducted research in the area Auslan assessment, especially as a first language, in the evaluation of sign bilingual education programs, and on sociolinguistic variation in Auslan. He is the director of the Auslan corpus project funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project and to be archive at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is also Chief Investigator on two ARC (Australian Research Council) funded projects: (1) corpus-based research into how the use of space can realise and encode grammatical roles and grammatical relations in Auslan (with Dr Louise de Beuzeville); and (2) research into the Auslan/English interpreter-mediated communication in health and medical settings, focussing on developing, sharing and harmonizing the use of medical terminology in Auslan through Auslan Signbank (an internet-based dictionary of Auslan). He is also currently comparing variation in Auslan and British Sign Language (a closely related sign language) for evidence of grammaticalization and language age.

 

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Dr. Sachiko Shudo
Formal Semantics and Pragmatics
Japan

Sachiko Shudo is Associate Professor of English and Linguistics in Waseda University in Tokyo. She received her Ph.D. (1998) in linguistics from Georgetown University. Her dissertation, The Presupposition and the Discourse Function of the Japanese Particle mo, was published in Routledge’s Outstanding Dissertation in Linguistics Series. Before joining Waseda University in 2005, she worked for the University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology as a visiting fellow for several years. Her main research interests include pragmatic issues involving presupposition of additives and scalar particles. She is also conducting research in the area of language and law.

 

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Dr. Danilo T. Dayag

Discourse Pragmatics

Philippines

Dr. DANILO T. DAYAG is the Chair of the Department of English and Applied Linguistics and former Vice Dean of the College of Education, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines, where he holds the rank of Associate Professor. A holder of a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics, he was Visiting Professor at the College of World Englishes, Chukyo University, Nagoya, Japan, from April 2006 to March 2007. He has presented papers in the USA, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand, and has served as module developer and national trainer for the Module on Written Communication for Teachers in the Commission on Higher Education’s Continuing Education Program (CEP): English Language Proficiency Training Program. His scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as World Englishes (Blackwell Publishing), Asian Englishes (ALC Press, Tokyo, Japan), Asia Pacific Education Review (Seoul National University, South Korea), and the Philippine Journal of Linguistics (Linguistic Society of the Philippines) of which he is the editor. His recent publications on Philippine English have been included in volumes like World Englishes and Miscommunications (Waseda University International, Tokyo, Japan) and Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives (Hong Kong University Press).  His first single-authored book is entitled Metadiscourse, Argumentation, and Asian Englishes: A Contrastive Rhetoric Approach (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, in press). He has recently completed the compilation of The Corpus of Asian Magazine Advertising: The Philippine Database and is the convener of the La Salle Corpus of Philippine Languages (LASCOPHIL). Dr. Dayag’s research interests are in the areas of discourse analysis, contrastive (intercultural) rhetoric, World Englishes, and semantics and pragmatics.

 

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