Date: 02-Apr-2009
From: Taylor Cassidy <taylorcassidy64 gmail.com>
Subject: Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition
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Full Title: Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition
Short Title: PsychoCompLA-2009
Date: 28-Jul-2009 - 29-Jul-2009
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Contact Person: William Sakas
Meeting Email: Psycho.Comphunter.cuny.edu
Web Site: http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/
Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Language
Acquisition; Psycholinguistics
Call Deadline: 15-May-2009
Meeting Description:
This workshop intends to bring together researchers from cognitive psychology,
computational linguistics, other computer/mathematical sciences, linguistics and
psycholinguistics working on all areas of language acquisition. Diversity and
cross-fertilization of ideas is the central goal.
Call for Papers
Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition (PsychoCompLA-2009)
July 28th & 29th at CogSci 2009 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/
Submission Deadline: May 15, 2009
Workshop Topic:
The workshop is devoted to psychologically-motivated computational models of
language acquisition. That is, models which are compatible with research in
psycholinguistics, developmental psychology and linguistics.
Invited Speakers:
- Tom Griffiths, University of California, Berkeley
- Amy Weinberg, University of Maryland (to be confirmed)
Workshop History:
This is the fifth meeting of the Psychocomputational Models of Human Language
Acquisition workshop following PsychoCompLA-2004, held in Geneva, Switzerland as
part of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-
2004), PsychoCompLA-2005 as part of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association
for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2005) held in Ann Arbor, Michigan where the
workshop shared a joint session with the Ninth Conference on Computational
Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2005), PsychoCompLA-2007 held in Nashville,
Tennessee as part of the 29th meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-
2007), and PsychoCompLA-2008 held in Washington D.C., as part of the 30th
meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-2008). Given the increasing
interest, this year the workshop will be spread over two days directly before
the main conference of the 31st meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
(CogSci-2009) which begins on July 30th, 2009.
Workshop Description:
The workshop will present research and foster discussion centered around
psychologically-motivated computational models of language acquisition, with an
emphasis on the acquisition of syntax. In recent decades there has been a
thriving research agenda that applies computational learning techniques to
emerging natural language technologies and many meetings, conferences and
workshops in which to present such research. However, there have been only a few
(but growing number of) venues in which psychocomputational models of how humans
acquire their native language(s) are the primary focus.
Psychocomputational models of language acquisition are of particular interest in
light of recent results in developmental psychology that suggest that very young
infants are adept at detecting statistical patterns in an audible input stream.
Though, how children might plausibly apply statistical 'machinery' to the task
of grammar acquisition, with or without an innate language component, remains an
open and important question. One effective line of investigation is to
computationally model the acquisition process and determine interrelationships
between a model and linguistic or psycholinguistic theory, and/or correlations
between a model's performance and data from linguistic environments that
children are exposed to.
Topics and Goals:
Short papers that present research on (but not necessarily limited to) the
following topics are welcome:
- Models that address the acquisition of word-order;
- Models that combine parsing and learning;
- Formal learning-theoretic and grammar induction models that incorporate
psychologically plausible constraints;
- Comparative surveys that critique previously reported studies;
- Models that have a cross-linguistic or bilingual perspective;
- Models that address learning bias in terms of innate linguistic knowledge
versus statistical regularity in the input;
- Models that employ language modeling techniques from corpus linguistics;
- Models that employ techniques from machine learning;
- Models of language change and its effect on language acquisition or vice versa;
- Models that employ statistical/probabilistic grammars;
- Computational models that can be used to evaluate existing linguistic or
developmental theories (e.g., principles & parameters, optimality theory,
construction grammar, etc.)
- Empirical models that make use of child-directed corpora such as CHILDES.
This workshop intends to bring together researchers from cognitive psychology,
computational linguistics, other computer/mathematical sciences, linguistics and
psycholinguistics working on all areas of language acquisition. Diversity and
cross-fertilization of ideas is the central goal.
Workshop Organizers:
Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam (rens.boduva.nl)
William Gregory Sakas, City University of New York (sakashunter.cuny.edu)
Workshop Co-Organizer:
Taylor Cassidy, City University of New York (Pyshco.Comphunter.cuny.edu)
Submission Details:
Authors are invited to submit short papers of (maximally) 2 pages of narrative
plus 2 pages for data, references and other supplementary materials. Papers
should be anonymous, clearly titled and the narrative section should be no more
than 1400 words in length. Either PDF, or MS Word formats are acceptable. Please
include a cover sheet (as a separate attachment) containing the title of your
submission, your name, contact details and affiliation. Send your submission
electronically to
Email: Psycho.Comphunter.cuny.edu
with PsychoCompLA-2009 Submission somewhere in the subject line.
Publication:
The accepted papers will appear in the online workshop proceedings. Full papers
of accepted short papers will be considered in Fall 2009 for inclusion in an
issue of the new Cognitive Science Society Journal - topiCS - whose focus will
be psychocomputational modeling of human language acquisition.
Submission deadline: May 15, 2009
Contact: Psycho.Comphunter.cuny.edu
with PsychoCompLA-2009 somewhere in the subject line.
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