Description: Chiefly papers presented at PALC 2007, the sixth conference in the biennial cycle of meetings organized by the Dept. of English Language at Lodz University.
Review Quotes: PALC celebrates its 10th anniversary with a bumper conference proceeding - comprising papers on challenges related to learners of English, machine and human translation, terminology extraction, subtitling and challenges related to the role of the ubiquitous Internet in teaching and learning of languages. And, if this was not enough there are two papers related to what the authors call the equivalent of a GUT (grand unified theory) of language. PALC is a conference which always has had an exciting mix of scholars, looking at language from different perspectives but unified in using text corpora, and now speech corpora, and in substantiating their claims through the use of the corpora. And, it is in PALC that West is now meeting East: the Anglo-American-Continental linguists are finding about central and eastern European scholarship; a touch of Chinese and Arabic language scholarship makes PALC a heady mix. These proceedings should and will be widely read. (Khurshid Ahmad, Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin)