The fifth in the series of TELRI (Trans-European Language Resources Infrastructure) seminars will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on 21-23 September 2000 with the theme "Corpus Linguistics: How to Extract Meaning from Corpora". 

Theme

The universe of discourse, that is, the ensemble of all communication acts of a discourse community, functions as an autonomous semantic system. This does not contest that texts may also refer to some discourse-external reality. But first and foremost texts, text segments and text elements refer to previous occurrences: they address, paraphrase and rearrange segments and elements that have been used before, in the same text or in other texts. Corpus linguistics detects and analyzes the recurrence of meaningful conglomerates in the discourse, combining statistical and categorial approaches and resulting in the structured presentation of the evidence. This evidence represents the shareable meaning of text segments and text elements. The paraphrases we find in the discourse tell us how to understand them; usage, that is, information on how segments and elements are embedded in their contexts, tells us how to produce texts in which they are being used. Corpus linguistics is about extracting meaning from (monolingual, comparable or parallel) corpora. Corpus linguistics generates the semantic knowledge which is the basis of language practice as in information extraction, translation or foreign language document authoring. 

Corpus linguistics is the prime approach to Human Language Technology if we understand HLT as the technology for dealing with general unrestricted language as opposed to controlled languages as formal calculi.
 

Invited Speakers

Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University, USA)
Gregory Grefenstette (Xerox Research Centre Europe, France)
Ferenc Kiefer (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
Antoinette Renouf (University of Liverpool, UK)
 

Workshop on Project Work

A pre-seminar workshop on Thursday, September 21, is dedicated to presentations of project work. 

Fees

Academic participants:	EUR 50/20*
Industrial participants:	EUR 100/30*

* refers to fees for participants from CEE/NIS

Venue

This year's TELRI seminar will take place in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, a medieval town at the crossroads of Mediterranean and Central-European cultures. The venue of the seminar will be the Faculty of Arts, located near the historical centre of the town and within walking distance to most hotels. The Faculty itself has recently been extended with an annexe, which provides new, well-equipped and airy classrooms for the seminar sessions as well as a cafeteria for the coffee breaks. OHP and beamer will be available in the presentation rooms; Internet access will be provided in the computer lab in the main building. 

Further Information

Further information can be obtained from
http://nl.ijs.si/telri00/
telri-admin@nytud.hu