Program

The keynote speakers

Dr. Kenneth R. Beesley is a computational linguist with the title of Development Architect at SAP Labs. He has taught finite-state programming techniques in the USA, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Ireland, Malta and South Africa, and he is the author, with Lauri Karttunen, of the book "Finite State Morphology," 2003, CSLI Publications, which documents the Xerox Finite-State Toolkit. This toolkit has been used to implement tokenizers, spelling checkers, morphological analyzers and shallow parsers for languages around the world.  Beesley remains excited about the application of computational linguistics to minority, lesser-studied, and endangered languages.

Raphael Berthele is a Full Professor of multilingualism at the University of Fribourg from 2006. After a PhD in sociolinguistic and language variation, he spent a year as a post-doc at the University of California at Berkley. He then came back to Europe and worked as a linguist for the German departments at the Universities of Fribourg and Berne and as a lecturer for German as a foreign language  in Fribourg. His current research interests include multilingualism, intercomprehension, receptive competences, cross-linguistic interaction, as well as cognitive linguistics, variational linguistics and folk linguistics. Professor Berthele is also in charge of the research area on Multilingualism competence and language contact, and coordinates several research projects, including: Interlinguale Inferenzen und Lebensalter, which investigates interlingual transfer across the lifespan; and Mehrsprachigkeit und Lebensalter, which focuses on compentence areas that are fundamental in the learning and in usage of multiple languages, and how these change over the lifespan. Among his awards are the Hugo-Moser Preis and the Förderpreis der Oertli-Stiftung.

Ellen Bialystok, Ph.D., FRSC, is Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York University and Associate Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1976. Much of her research has focused on the effect of bilingualism on children’s language and cognitive development, showing accelerated mastery of specific cognitive processes for bilingual children. This research has recently been extended to investigations of adult processing and found that lifelong bilingualism protects older adults from cognitive decline with aging. Other research includes studies of literacy acquisition in young children, models of metalinguistic awareness and second-language acquisition, and the development of spatial cognition and its relation to other cognitive abilities. She is the author of 6 books and over 100 scientific papers in journals and books. Among her awards are a Killam Prize for the Social Sciences, Walter Gordon Research Fellowship, Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research, and Language Learning Distinguished Scholar in Residence. She has been invited to lecture in universities around the world, covering four continents and numerous countries.

Kendall King is a Professor in Second Language and Culture at the University of Minnesota. Her research encompasses ideological, interactional and policy perspectives on second language learning and bilingualism, with particular attention to educational practices impacting language use among Indigenous populations in Latin America and Spanish speakers in the U.S.  She has examined classroom-home-community contexts of linguistic contact, language use and identity production in the rural Andes and urban centers of Chile, Sweden and the U.S. Recent projects examine Ojibwe language learning in urban revitalization efforts, and the power of Somali print in formal educational contexts.

Mikel L. Forcada is professor of Computer Languages and Systems at the Universitat d'Alacant. He is also secretary of the European Association for Machine Translation, president of the Special Interest Group for Speech and Language Technologies for Minority Languages (SaLTMiL) of the International Speech Communication Association, and book review editor of the international journal Machine Translation. From the turn of the millennium on, Prof. Forcada's interests have mainly focussed on the field of translation technologies, but he has worked in fields as diverse as quantum chemistry, biotechnology, surface physics, machine learning (especially with neural networks) and automata theory. Professor Forcada has headed several research projects and has led the development of the machine translation systems interNOSTRUM (Spanish-Catalan) and Traductor Universia (Spanish-Portuguese). In 2004 he started the free/open-source machine translation platform Apertium (with more than 30 language pairs), where he is currently the president of the project management committee. In 2009–2010 Forcada was an ETS Walton Visiting Professor in the machine translation group at Dublin City University (Dublin/Baile Átha Cliath, Ireland). Professor Forcada has been president of the Civic Association for the Normalization of Valencian.

Elana Shohamy is a Professor of language education at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University. Her research and writings focus on a variety of topics related to language testing and language policy in the context of conflicts and co-existence in multilingual societies. Her work in language testing focuses on critical views of language tests in terms of the political, social, educational and human consequences of tests due to their enormous power. Her work on policy focuses on an expanded framework of language policy, language rights, immigration, language maintenance and especially linguistic landscape. Prof. Shohamy is the editor of the journal Language Policy. Her recent books include: The power of tests: 2001, Longman; Language policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches, 2006, Routledge; Volume 7 Encyclopedia of Language and Education: Language Testing and Assessment (ed. with Nancy Hornberger, Springer, 2008); Linguistic landscape: expanding the scenery, (ed. with Durk Gurter, 2009, Routledge); and Linguistic landscape in the city (ed. with Ben Rafael and Barni, Multilingual Matters, 2010). Elana was granted the Lifetime Achievement Award of ILTA (International Language Testing Association), in Cambridge, 2010.