Welcome

The Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) is an annual general linguistics conference that continues the tradition of the Polish–English contrastive conferences started by Jacek Fisiak in 1970. The name "Poznań Linguistic Meeting" was adopted in 1997, when Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk took over as the Head of the Organising Committee. The Meetings are organised by the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. Materials from past PLMs are archived here.

PLM2022: 08–10 Sep 2022

We are very happy to announce the 51st edition of the Poznań Linguistic Meeting on 08–10 September 2022. The meeting will be organized in an in-person format by the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań.

The leitmotif of PLM2022 will be “What can linguists offer to AI? Unique contributions of linguistics to science and beyond”.

In recent years, advances in broadly construed Artificial Intelligence have made an impact on all aspects of life, and linguistics is not an exception. The digital revolution has come about in great part through progress in speech and language processing technology such as text mining and conversational AI. This has also had a profound impact on linguistics as a scientific discipline: it seems like machines are now able to "learn" anything, even such complex human skills such as speech and language.

Or are they? Are we truly on the verge of solving all the major problems of natural language via modelling in technical systems? Apart from assessing how far we have come in the area of text-based and speech-based Artificial Intelligence, we also ask, does the current revolution mean that the traffic of knowledge is one-way only?

Whether you think that that indeed is the case, or wish to argue that linguistics is not only crucial for AI as a knowledge source but also contributes more generally to science and society, well beyond the impact of data-driven machine learning, we invite you to contribute to the discussion. Contributions from all subdisciplines of linguistics not related to the leitmotif are also more than welcome.

Plenary events
 

Keynote lecture:

  • Alexandra Aikhenvald (CQ University Australia): " In with the new: How technological advances affect minority languages of Amazonia and New Guinea" [PDF abstract]

Plenary lectures:

  • Krzysztof Jassem (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań): "Can we defeat Google translate" [PDF abstract]
  • Johann-Mattis List (Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, MPI-EVA, Leipzig): "From Machine Learning to Machine Training: How linguistically informed models can improve machine learning approaches in comparative linguistics" [PDF abstract]

As is our tradition, we will conclude with a Grand Debate related to the leitmotif.

Thematic sessions

  • Multilingual ecologies in a comparative perspective: well-being of speakers, social practices and challenges to linguistic diversity. Organized by Justyna Olko and Katarzyna Wojtylak (Warsaw University) [See description]
  • An AI revolution? Not without speech and language sciences. How
    much further can AI go with technology and sciences working together?     Organized by Zofia Malisz (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) [See description]
  • How language and emotion interact in a bilingual mind. Convened by Guillaume Thierry and Rafał Jończyk (AMU) [See description]
  • Investigating bi-/multilingual acquisition in different populations and varied settings from interdisciplinary perspectives. Convened by Magdalena Wrembel (AMU), Ewa Haman (UW), Marit Westergaard (UiT), Anne Dahl (NTNU), Roumyana Slabakova (NTNU), Nina Garmann (OsloMet/ MultiLing, UiO) [See description]
  • NEW Approaches to the Study of Sound Structure and Speech. A special session in honour of prof. Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk. Organized by Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, Magdalena Wrembel and Piotr Gąsiorowski (AMU) [See description]

PhD Session

Another PLM tradition, that of our special session aimed at young researchers looking for feedback on their PhD projects, will also be continued.

Submission guidelines

Proposals of thematic/workshop sessions and papers are invited for both oral and poster presentations related to the leitmotif, to other topics within modern linguistics, and to the topics of the thematic sessions.

Each paper in the general oral sessions will be given 30 minutes, including 10 minutes for discussion. Poster sessions will form an integral part of the conference programme. The number of submissions is limited to one single-authored plus one co-authored abstract per author (or two co-authored ones). This limitation does not apply to PhD candidate posters. The language of the conference is English. All abstracts will be processed using the EasyChair conference management system. The submissions will be reviewed by our International Advisory Board. Please visit this page for more detailed abstract submission guidelines, along with abstract review criteria.