[dm-l] Web genres

Hi all,

The following may be of interest to some on this list, though the deadline is tight:

    APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTINGS
    ---------------------------

    2nd Call for Abstracts

    Corpus Linguistics 2007 Colloquium: 
    Towards a reference corpus of web genres


    COLLOQUIUM DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES

    Genres of spoken and written texts are being intensively
    studied from
    various angles, e.g., communication studies, discourse
    analysis,
    computational linguistics, without arriving at a generally
    accepted
    definition. The web is new, so it is not clear how to apply
    traditional
    notions of genre to web pages. In this colloquium we would
    like collect
    submissions that study characteristics of web genres with
    respect to
    traditional paper genres represented in electronic corpora
    like the BNC. 

    Web documents are often characterised by a high level of genre
    hybridism,
    by a fragmentation of textuality across several documents, by
    the impact of
    technical features such as hyperlinking, posting facilities
    and
    multi-authoring. The web is a huge reservoir of documents that
    can be
    easily mined for building all sorts of corpora with many
    collections being
    built according to subjective criteria for
    corpus composition, genre annotation, genre representativeness
    and genre
    granularity. In this colloquium we would like to invite
    submissions
    contributing to a reference corpus of web genres. The main
    goal of the
    colloquium is to draw up an initial list of characteristics
    and
    requirements for building, annotating and evaluation reference
    corpora of
    web genres. For instance:

    * To what extent should genre hybridism and authorial
    creativity be
    represented in a genre collection? These two phenomena appear
    to be very 
    common on the web.

    * To what extent is it possible to include ''emerging
    genres'', i.e.,
    genres still in a transitional phase in genre evolution? The
    web is
    currently thriving with emerging genres.

    * How many granularities of the unit of analysis should be
    included? Only
    genres representing web sites? Only genre representing web
    pages? Both? 

    * What ''format'' should be used to store these units in a
    collection
    (e.g., a database-like form, DOM trees, a net of graphs, in
    HTML format, in
    a text-only version, with or without embedded images, removing
    boilerplate
    components)?

    * What level of genre granularity and similarity should be
    applied in the
    reference corpus? Genre collections often show different
    levels of  
    granularity, including genres and super-genres. Should similar
    genres, such
    as ''tutorial'' and ''how-to'', be accounted for separately? 

    TOPICS:

    The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

    - Text theory for the development of web corpora
    - Modelling corpora of web genres
    - Innovative genre classification schemes accounting for
    multi-genre and
    no-genre web documents
    - Modelling genre annotation scheme for web documents
    (metadata organization)
    - Assembling a list of web genres for a reference corpus
    - Creating comparable corpora of web genre 
    - Automatic genre classification vs. human genre
    classification
    - How to evaluate the corpus: using statistical measures,
    relying on corpus
    linguists, librarians, or web users?

    PARTICIPATION

    The aim of this colloquium, the first ever organized on this
    topic, is to
    bring together researchers from different communities such as
    corpus
    linguistics, genre analysis, digital genre community,
    computational
    linguistics, and information retrieval in order to promote the
    discussion
    and development of new ideas and methods to create new corpora
    for language
    studies and as evaluation resources.

    Send abstrats to: webgenres@googlemail.com
    Please, specify ''Colloquium Abstracts'' in the subject line.

    Abstract submissions should include: 
         * Presenter contact information (mailing address, phone,
    e-mail & fax) 
         * A paper proposal (250 word max) 
         * An abstract for the program (50 word max) 

    The deadline for submissions is Dec 15, 2006
    Notification of acceptance will be sent out by Jan 11, 2007

    *LOCATION*:
    The colloquium will take place in the UK at the end of July
    2007. The venue
    and the exact date of the colloquium will be announced at the
    end of
    January 2007.

    Colloquium Organization:

    Marina Santini (University of Brighton, UK)
    Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)

    Program Committee:

    Marco Baroni (University of Bologna, Italy)
    Stefan Gries (University of California, USA)
    Adam Kilgarriff (Lexmasterclass, UK)
    Alexander Mehler (Bielefeld University, Germany)
    Sven Meyer zu Eissen (University of Weimar, Germany)
    John Paolillo (Indiana University, USA)
    Paul Rayson (UCREL, Lancaster Uni, UK)
    Georg Rehm (University of Tuebingen, Germany)
    Marina Santini (University of Brighton, UK)
    Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
    Benno Stein (University of Weimar, Germany)

    Contacts:
    ========
    Main contact: Serge Sharoff (s.sharoff@leeds.ac.uk)
    Other contact: Marina Santini
    (Marina.Santini@itri.brighton.ac.uk) 


    Linguistic Field(s): Text/Corpus Linguistics