Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute
Department of Statistics
University of Glasgow, UK
11, 12 September 1997
Preliminary Announcement
In recent years techniques from disciplines such as computer science,
articficial intelligence and statistics have found their way into the
pages of journals such as the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics,
Literary and Linguistic Computing and Computers and the
Humanities. While this influx may bring more advanced methods of
analysis to the fields of quantitative linguistics, stylometry and
stylistics, the demands upon researchers to understand and use these
new techniques are great. Familiarity with the appropriate software
and the ear of a sympathetic expert are pre-requisites without which
the technique may seem out of reach to the average researcher. The
Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute and the
Department of Statistics of the University of Glasgow are hence
supporting this practical workshop in Computationally-Intensive
Methods in Quantitative Linguistics.
The workshop is designed to introduce the participants to four such
techniques in a practical environment. Each half-day session will be
divided into an introductory session in a lecture theatre and a longer
period spent working with software and practical examples. All of the
speakers have published papers using the analyses they will present
and their aim in this workshop is to enable the participants to return
to their home institutions able to carry out these techniques in the
course of their own research.
The sessions and speakers are as follows:
Deconstructing texts with electronic dice: Monte Carlo methods in
lexical statistics.
Harald Baayen; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen,
The Netherlands.
Fitting probability distributions to linguistic data. Deductive and
explorative methods in synergetic linguistics.
Reinhard Koehler; University of Trier, Germany.
Evolutionary Computing and Text Categorization.
Richard Forsyth; University of the West of England, Bristol,
United Kingdom.
Neural Nets, Principal Component Analysis, Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Thomas Merriam; United Kingdom.
The workshop will be held in the Boyd Orr Building of the University
of Glasgow, commencing on Wednesday 10 September with a reception in
the Hunterian Art Gallery. The four workshop sessions will take place
on Thursday 11 September and Friday 12 September. There will also be a
half day to Loch Lomond and the Glen Goyne whisky distillery on the
morning of Saturday 13 September.
Accommodation has been arranged in university accommodation with some
en suite facilities. Tea and coffee, lunches and evening meals on 11
and 12 September are included in the registration fee. Financial
details are yet to be finalised, but it is expected that the
registration fee will not be more than GBP150.
For more information about the workshop, please consult the web site
at http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/~cimql, or send email to the conference
organisers at cimql@stats.gla.ac.uk.