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

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.

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).

The organizers of the Pan-American International Symposium on Toponymy have announced that the official deadline for abstracts has been extended to the 12th of March 2017.  This conference will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from the 3rd to the 5th of May 2017.  A special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Cartography will be published at the end of the conference.  Online conference registration information can be found here.

Three main themes will guide the event: Toponymy and education, Indigenous and minority Toponymy, Toponymy in maps. However, contributions on other themes may be accepted. The regional focus of the Symposium will be on the Americas, but also contributions focusing on countries, regions and places on other continents may be presented, since they may very well provide for stimulating comparisons. The languages of the Symposium will be Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Abstracts may be submitted in any of the three languages.

The conference is organized by the Joint IGU / ICA Commission on Toponymy, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), in cooperation with the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH).

From the 23^rd to the 29^th of July 2017, the XIX International Botanical Congress will be held in the Shenzhen Convention & Exhibition Center, Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China. For the 2017 meeting, proposals to amend the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plant (Melbourne Code) will be discussed by the Nomenclature Section of the Congress.  A list of the general symposia has been posted at the IBC website.

The deadline for abstract submissions for poster presentations has been extended to the 15^th of March 2017. In addition to public, plenary and keynote lectures, they have scheduled more than 200 General Symposia covering all fields of plant sciences. Each symposium consists of either six presentations (one-session symposium) or 12 presentations (two-session symposium), with each being 20 minutes. Detailed information on the submission requirements can be found here.

From the 11th to the 12th of September, the University of Siegen in Germany will be holding a special symposium dedicated to the topic of secret names or “Namen im Geheimen”. The event  is a part of the programme being offered during the 11th International Symposium on Special Linguistic Research. Researchers interested in participating in the symposium are asked to submit a 300 word abstract by the 1st of April 2017 to hardy at romanistik.uni-siegen.de. Presentations may be held in either English or German. You can read the complete call for papers here.

The Symposium is expressly designed to be cross-lingual. They welcome contributions from different philologies. For each lecture 40 minutes (30 minutes lecture + 10 minutes discussion) are planned. A publication is published in the CMS (special language research group) Hamburg / Münster.

From the 28th to the 29th of August 2017, an international conference on lexicography will be held on the island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. The conference is being held by AustraLex, the Australasian Association for Lexicography, a scientific organization devoted to the development of lexicography in all languages of the Australasian region. The theme of this year’s conference will be “Intersections between oral narratives, traditions, lexicography and new media”.

Papers may address a wide range of areas associated with lexicography, including,
but not limited to: contact linguistics; culture and identity; e-lexicography; endangered languages; learners’ dictionaries; lexicology; music and language; onomastics; oral traditions and language; phraseology; paremiology; Revival Linguistics; social empowerment through language; specialist dictionaries; and terminology.

The second call for papers has just been issued. For more on this event, visit the AustraLex website or check out their Facebook page.