PLM2008 Workshop Session: African languages in advance: language technology and acquisition (Poland)

Source: Aflat

Thu, 2008-03-13 19:14 — Karien

The Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) is an annual general linguistics conference that continues the tradition of the Polish-English contrastive conferences started by Jacek Fisiak in 1970. The name “Poznań Linguistic Meeting” was adopted in 1997, when Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk took over as the Head of the Organising Committee. The Meetings are organised by the School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań.

PLM2008 Workshop Session: African languages in advance: language technology and acquisition

With the leitmotif of the 39th PLM in mind, the workshop “African
languages in advance” will focus on recent South African linguistic
perspectives. In a multilingual society, with eleven official languages,
research in language is more needed than ever. The South African
Government’s Department of Arts and Culture realised the importance of
maintaining linguistic diversity and that is why a national strategy for
human language technology (HLT) was drafted in 2004 “to provide for
setting up a national HLT facility to co-ordinate research, development,
training and consultation”
(http://www.dac.gov.za/publications/strategic_plan/str_plan2005_10.pdf).

During this workshop, we want to discuss the advances in the field of
human language technology (speech and text technology) and research in
language acquisition in the past few years. The topics will range from the
developing of core technologies (e.g. parsers, morphological analysers)
and applications (e.g. electronic dictionaries, spellcheckers and language
acquisition packages) to the methodology of language acquisition
(especially in a multicultural environment such as South Africa). This
will also be an opportunity for interaction between South African and
European researchers.

Session organisers
Karien Brits (Adam Mickiewicz University), e-mail: karien (at) ifa.amu.edu.pl
Aleksandra Cichocka (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań), e-mail: olukomska (at) yahoo.com
(In the addresses above, replace (at) with @)

Important dates:
Main submission deadline for all abstracts (papers, posters and workshop
sessions): 1 May 2008
Notification of acceptance for papers and posters: 1 June 2008

Links:
http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/plm/African_languages
http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/plm/

Nigeria: Ido language lessons

Edo Nation has some fairly rudimentary Ido language lessons 

as does EdoFolks where you’ll also find the following:

Edo Proverb 1
Edo Proverb2
Teach Yourslf Edo Language
24 major Edoid dialects in Nigeria
Nigeria’s Modern Language
WAZOBIA
Edo General Language
10 Edo Proverbs
Edo Months and Seasons
Edo Language Class (2/03)
Can we speak one language (2/03)
Common Titles and Definitions in Edo Language  (2/05)
Definitions of an “Obo” and “Ogie-Obo”  (2/05)
Political Office Minister in Edo Language  (2/05)
Edo Dictionary Online  (6/06)

Nigeria: Igbo language lessons and more

 Igbonet has a series of Igbo language lessons, essays about the culture and people and more