Month: March 2017

Seeking New ANS Officers for 2018

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Ever thought about getting more involved with the American Name Society but did not know how?  Here is your opportunity!  The American Name Society is currently looking for a few good people who are interested in joining the Executive Council.  Starting January 2017, new officers will be needed to fill the positions listed below.

 

To apply for one or more of these positions, please fill out the application form on this page.

 

ANS Treasurer (2018-2020)

The person elected to this position will be responsible for keeping official record of all funds and securities of the Society; giving and keeping receipts for moneys due and payable to the Society; depositing all moneys in the name of the Society; responding to inquiries from annual conference attendees regarding registration payments; and informing the ANS President, the members of the ANS Executive Council, and the general membership about the financial status of the Society via an end-of-the year fiscal report. The ANS Treasurer will work closely with the ANS President, Vice President, and Membership Officer as well as Taylor & Francis, the current publisher of the ANS Journal NAMES. The person elected to this position is expected to have demonstrable accounting experience and competence in using standard spreadsheets programs (e.g., Excel). Applicants for this position must be long-term ANS members in good standing.

 

Member-at-large (2017-2020)

The person elected to this position will serve as a voting member of the Executive Council (EC) and is expected to participate actively in the legislative decision-making involved in resolutions and motions placed before the EC.  In addition to these duties, members-at-large serve on various auxiliary sub-committees to, for example, help with the nomination of new officers, coordination of the annual conference, and organization of allied conferences.  Officers in this position can renew their term of service twice.

 

Allied Conference Coordinator (2018-2020)

The person elected to this position is principally responsible for organizing the ANS session at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association. This activity involves issuing a call for papers, assembling a team of abstract reviewers, selecting three authors whose work will be presented at the MLA conference, and coordinating the presentation of the three winning abstracts with the MLA administration. In addition to these duties, as a voting member of the ANS Executive Council (EC), the Allied Conference Coordinator participates in the legislative decision-making of the Society. Although the term of service for this position is for two years, the holder of this office may be re-elected pending approval by the EC. Given the fact that this position requires close communication with the MLA, candidates who have a demonstrated expertise in literary onomastics will receive preference. Holders of this position are also eligible for election as an ANS Vice President.

 

Coordinator for 4 ANS Facebook Special Interest Groups (2018-2020)

The person elected to this position is principally responsible for managing the ANS Facebook Special Interest Groups (SIGs). There are four ANS SIGs: 1) Personal Names, 2) Literary Names, 3) Trade Names, and 4) Place Names. For each of one of those SIGs, the coordinator is responsible for stimulating and monitoring discussions between users; regularly posting material of thematic interest; answering queries from the general public; and coordinating an informal gathering in-person during the annual ANS meetings. The people chosen for these positions are expected to have excellent writing skills; be a frequent and enthusiastic Facebook user; and have a demonstrable interest in the thematic area of the relevant SIG. The coordinators of the ANS Facebook SIGs will work closely with one another, the ANS President and Vice President, and the ANS Information Officer.

Call for Papers: ALW1: 1st Workshop on Abusive Language Online, Vancouver, Canada, July 30-August 4 2017

Recent years have seen an exponential increase in the frequency and severity of abusive language used online. From the 3rd to the 4th of August 2017, ALW1: 1st Workshop on Abusive Language Online, an international scientific workshop on this linguistic phenomenon will be held in Vancouver, Canada.  The workshop will be held in as a part of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) which will be held from July 30th to August 4th, 2017.  Researchers interested in submitting an abstract proposal for possible presentation at the workshop can find out more about this important event at the website. Submission guidelines are here. The submission deadline is Thursday, the 27th of April 2017.

Paper Topics

Long and short papers on any of the following general topics are invited:

  • Assessment of all current methods of addressing abusive language

  • The social, personal and cultural effects of abusive language online

  • Legal ramifications of measures taken against abusive language use

  • NLP models and methods for abusive language detection

  • Application of NLP tools to analyze social media content and other large data sets

  • NLP models for cross-lingual abusive language detection

  • Best practices for using NLP techniques in watchdog settings

  • Development of corpora and annotation guidelines

The islands at the heart of Japan-Russia dispute

06/06/2010 at 03 :05 UTC
Southern Kuril Islands
Satellite: Aqua
NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team

Diplomatic tensions between Japan and Russia have become extremely tense over naming rights.  Japan has filed a formal protest against Russia’s decision to give names to five uninhabited islands in the Kuril chain.  Located in the Pacific Ocean, just to the North of Japan’s Hokkaido Island, the chain has been a source of contention between the two for nearly a century.  The act of naming is not the only reason for Japan’s ire, but also the onomastic inspiration for the name.  For example, one of the disputed islands has apparently been named after General Kuzma Derevyanko.  According to CNN, it was General Derevyanko “signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender with the Allies in 1945”. The Japan Times has also covered this international dispute over names and territory.

“The Dynamics of Lexical Innovation: Data, Methods, Models” workshop, Munich, Germany, June 28-30, 2017

A workshop entitled “The Dynamics of Lexical Innovation: Data, Methods, Models” has been scheduled for the 28th to the 30th of June 2017 in Munich, Germany.  The purpose of the workshop is to offer lexicography experts a scientific forum for cooperatively investigating the ways in which lexical innovations diffuse speech communities via usage domains and media.  In particular, the focus will be placed on the challenges involved in the theoretical and computational models of lexical innovation and diffusion processes. Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the journal Pragmatics & Cognition in 2018. Read more about the workshop here.

Confirmed speakers include:

  • Richard Blythe
  • Christophe Gérard
  • Jack Grieve
  • Will Hamilton
  • Suzanne Kemmer
  • Terttu Nevalainen
  • Jelena Prokić
  • Tanja Säily

In Memoriam: William Noble

The officials of the Australian National Placenames Survey (ANPS) recently announced the passing of Australian toponymist, William Noble, the former editor of the ANPS Bulletin.  Among his many publications is the New Holland Dictionary of Names.  This reference offers detailed information on thousands of personal names in Australian use.  William, or “Bill” as he was most often called, is survived by his wife and their three sons.

Bill was the editor of the ANPS Bulletin, the predecessor of Placenames Australia, and designed the original masthead. Bill’s work in toponymy was just one aspect of his wider interest in name studies (onomastics), and in 2003 he published Names from Here and Far, the New Holland Dictionary of Names. The dictionary records and explains thousands of personal names in Australian use and is a celebration of Australia’s ‘glorious mix of names from over 150 cultures’.

Call for Papers: “Challenges for Wordnets” Workshop, LDK 2017, Galway, Ireland, June 18, 2017

On the 18th of June 2017, a workshop on computational linguistics, semantics, and lexicography will be taking place in Galway, Ireland. The official theme of the conference is “Challenges for Wordnets”. It will be co-located with the First Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2017). Wordnets are commonly used today to model word meanings in natural language processing. The one-day conference will specifically address the advantages and disadvantages posed by wordnets today. Abstracts for possible presentation are currently being accepted; read the Call for Papers here. In particular, papers dealing with modeling, application, compatibility, and evaluation are being solicited. Papers should be submitted via EasyChair. More information on the workshop can be found here. The deadline for submissions is March 30 2017.

Please submit papers of between 4-10 pages, excluding references, formatted using the Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence formatting guidelines. Submissions should be anonymous. Submissions will be reviewed by at least 3 reviewers and will be made available on online prior to the workshop.

Authors of good submissions will be invited to submit extended versions for a special issue of the Cognitive Studies | Études cognitives journal. The extended versions will be carefully peer reviewed, but the scope of this special issue will be set in advance.

DomainX™ 2017 Conference, London, England, April 9 2017

On the 9th of April 2017, an international conference on Domain Naming, DomainX™, will be held in London, England.  One of the main purposes of the conference is to spread public awareness about the industry of domain names and naming.  The conference also provides an excellent opportunity for globally networking within the this growing industry. More on this event can be found at the website.

Since inception in 2014, DomainX™ has been a dedicated annual domain name conference with multiple yearly events across the globe to network, spread awareness and educate public about domain names and the industry.

Call for Papers: Naming the Human, University of Strasbourg, France, January 12-18, 2018

In Strasbourg, France, a multidisciplinary conference dedicated to the names used to designate human beings, their activities, and their identities will be held from the 10th to the 12th of January 2018.  The official theme of this event is “Naming the Human: Description, Categorisation, Issues at Stake”.  Onomastic researchers interested in presenting their work are encouraged to submit a scientific abstract (max. 4 pages) by first creating an account at Sciencesconf.org, and then accessing the Submissions page. The deadline for abstract submissions is the 15th of June 2017. The official languages of the conference are English and French.  More information about this event can be found here: https://nhuma.sciencesconf.org/

This multidisciplinary symposium organized by Laboratory LiLPa (Linguistics, Language, Word, EA 1339) and DRES laboratory (Law, Religion, Business & Society, UMR 7354).

About Names: You can find Waldo — if you look hard enough; the name now is extremely rare

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his March 14th column, he looks at the history of the name Waldo. In Continental Europe, Waldo is a Latinized form of “wald,” Germanic “rule” or “power.” Originally part of names like Walter and Oswald, it was a nickname that became a surname. But only eight Waldos were born in the United States in 2015. Is it time for a revival of this name?