"Methods for linguistic convergence research" seminar at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory
From November 27 to December 1, 2017 a seminar on "Methods for linguistic convergence research" was held at the laboratory. The seminar was devoted to discussing the intermediate results of research projects, as well as the immediate tasks and general goals of the participants. It was the first joint meeting of all employees and partners.
Talks were presented by Vasilisa Andriyanets, Ilya Chechuro, Michael Daniel, Nina Dobrushina, Alexandra Kozhukhar, Olga Lyashevskaya, George Moroz, Johanna Nichols, Vasilisa Zhigulskaya, and Sven Grawunder (visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig), Stefan Gries (professor at the University of California Santa Barbara), Brigitte Pakendorf (lead researcher at CNRS Lyon), Juraj Šimko (University of Helsinki), Martti Vainio (professor at the University of Helsinki) and Ruprecht von Waldenfels (professor at the University of Oslo). The seminar was open to anyone interested, including students and teachers of HSE and other universities.
On the first day, Nina Dobrushina (the head of the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory) and Johanna Nichols (the laboratory's academic supervisor) talked about the mission of the laboratory, and the research assistants briefly outlined the goals and results of the research projects they are involved in.
Throughout the week, there were talks on prosody studies (Ilya Chechuro, Olga Lyashevskaya, Juraj Šimko, Martti Vainio), dialects of the Even language (Brigitta Pakendorf, Vasilisa Andriyanets), the study of variability in the Ustya river basin (Michael Daniel, Nina Dobrushina, Ruprecht von Waldenfels), the markup of Mehweb Dargwa in the format of Universal dependencies (Olga Lyashevskaya, Alexandra Kozhuhar), as well as several topics on the languages of Daghestan. In addition, discussions were held on how to format, store and publish data, including corpora.
On Wednesday, the guests of the laboratory conducted consultations for students and junior teachers of the School of Linguistics. After registering, they could visit the laboratory to consult experts on their research problems. In return, the School of Linguistics invited them to visit a presentation of various projects that students of computer linguistics are engaged in. A poster session was held dedicated to corpora. In this session, corpora developed by participants of the laboratory and by the winners of our grant competition were presented.
Finally, Stefan Gries read a course of three lectures on corpus linguistics for students of the master's programmes Linguistic Theory and Language Description and Computational Linguistics. The lectures were open to anybody and enjoyed great interest.
Workshop materials