Main themes of the Conference

The recent development of analytical tools and methodologies applied to textual analysis stands as a turning point in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting Studies and Information Sciences. There has been, in recent years, an exponential growth of technological and empirically-oriented studies of language with clear areas of convergence with other fields. In their wake, the goal of this Conference is to serve as a starting point for an integrating approach that may open intercultural studies of language to new technologies and applications, while complementing computational linguistics and network theory with a multidimensional approach to the complexity of texts. The Conference aims to examine, among others:

• The need to analyse and compare and identify regularities in an ever-increasing quantity of texts (corpora analyses)
• The development of artificial intelligence tools applied to information retrieval, keyword generation, automatic summary generation, semantic disambiguation, computer-assisted translation and automatised translation
• The development of a discourse analysis methodology in order to search and identify regularities and meaningful patterns in texts, at all levels (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and ideological levels)
• The development of new theoretical frameworks where signifying systems are seen as constituting networks (network theory), as those developed in fields where sequential analyses are essential, such as those developed in computational biology and related fields.

Thematic strands
• Semantic networking in texts: network theory applications
• Meaningful patterns in text
• Automatic recognition of meaningful patterns in text
• Pragmalinguistic and constructional models
• Formal approaches to argumentation, narrative and ideology in texts
• Teaching and learning intercultural competence through text

Target participants
The conference is intended for scholars and postgraduate students from a variety of approaches working in text analysis from a cross-cultural perspective, especially linguists, translators and language analysts involved in text analysis and production in research, professional or educational domains.