The conference program is now available.

Accomodation information can be found at the ISFC2005 site.

The Conference will be held in Room G92 of the Madsen Building, on the main (Camperdown) Campus of the University of Sydney. A map is available here, reference L17.

THE 1ST CSFG CONFERENCE IS TO BE HELD IN CONJUNCTION WITH:
ISFC2005 Pre-Congress Institute, International College of Tourism and Hotel Management, Manly, Sydney.
ISFC2005, University of Sydney, Sydney.

INTRODUCTION
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is now a well developed linguistic theory that has been used in many domains as a powerful resource for analysis of texts of a wide range of types, comprehensive descriptions of English, Chinese, Japanese, and a significant number of other languages, and theoretical modeling of language and other semiotic systems. One key domain since the 1960s has been computational linguistics (CL). It influenced Terry Winograd's work, contributed to the development of Martin Kay's functional unification grammar, and played a major role in the development of text generation, as this strand within CL expanded in the 1980s. The seminal work in this area was the Penman project; and this has led to the development of the current KPML system. However, there are many areas of CL where SFL has not played a role but where it could have made a significant contribution; and there are many lines of research in NLP that are highly relevant to SFL. Developments within both CL and SFL in the last decade or so have created a context where a much wider exchange and collaboration would now be very timely. For example, in SFL, there is a small emerging group of scholars who have independently developed tools for SFG text annotation, and grammars for analysis and text generation, as well as dialects of SFG itself. The theory now has enough coverage for use on larger tasks and the movement in CL to give more attention to semantic processing clearly makes the time ripe to bring the two communities together to explore mutual engagement and learn from each other's knowledge.

This conference is organised to satisfy the needs of and bring together two communities of scholars, providing a supportive context for linguists interested in pursuing computational applications and in using computational tools and for computational linguists who wish to exploit SFL's rich descriptions, extensive experience with text analysis, and theoretical modeling for computing meaning. The goal is to enrich both CL and SFL, and to facilitate the development of news areas of research and application.

The initial call for papers can be found here.