LINGUIST List 22.3015 Tue Jul 26 2011 Calls: Language Acquisition, Psycholing, Computational Ling/USA Editor for this issue: Alison Zaharee <alisonlinguistlist.org> LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3! Directory         1.     William Sakas , Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition Message 1: Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition Date: 26-Jul-2011 From: William Sakas <sakashunter.cuny.edu> Subject: Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition E-mail this message to a friend Full Title: Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition Short Title: PsychocompLA Date: 05-Jan-2012 - 05-Jan-2012 Location: Portland, Oregon, USA Contact Person: William Sakas Meeting Email: < click here to access email > Web Site: http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/ Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics Call Deadline: 08-Sep-2011 Meeting Description: PsychoCompLA-2012 Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition Portland, Oregon, Thursday, January 5th, 2012 http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/ Collocated with: Input and Syntactic Acquisition Workshop 2012 http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/CoLaLab/isa2012/ Satellite workshops of the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America http://www.lsadc.org/info/meet-annual.cfm Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation and the EU PASCAL2 Network of Excellence. 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. This is the sixth 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), and PsychoCompLA-2009 held over two days before the 31st meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-2009) in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Papers and programs of previous workshops are available at: http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/ 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. However, 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. Call for Papers: Topics and Goals: Given the collocation of the workshop with the Input and Syntactic Acquisition workshop, submissions that present research related to the acquisition of syntax are strongly encouraged, though submissions on the computational modelling on any aspect of human language acquisition are welcome. Specifically, submissions 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 linguistics, cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, other computational/mathematical sciences and psycholinguistics working on all areas of language acquisition. Diversity and cross-fertilization of ideas is the central goal. 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(s). Submit your submission via email to Psycho.Comphunter.cuny.edu with '2012 Submission' in the subject line. Important Dates: Submission deadline: Thursday, September 8th Notification of acceptance: Thursday, October 6th Workshop date: Jan 5th, 2012 PsychoCompLA Workshop Organizers: Alexander Clark, Royal Holloway, University of London, (alexccs.rhul.ac.uk) William Gregory Sakas, City University of New York (sakashunter.cuny.edu) ISA Workshop Organizers: Lisa Pearl University of California, Irvine (lpearlzuci.edu) Jon Sprouse University of California, Irvine (jsprouseuci.edu) Program Committee: Afra Alishahi, Saarland University Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam Naomi Feldman, University of Maryland Janet Fodor, City University of New York Bob Frank, Yale University Matt Goldrick, Northwestern, University John Goldsmith, University of Chicago Shalom Lappin, King's College London Roger Levy, University of California, San Diego Jeff Lidz, University of Maryland Garrett Mitchener, College of Charleston Colin Phillips, University of Maryland Ed Stabler, University of California, Los Angeles Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania Contact Email: Psycho.Comphunter.cuny.edu (please include 'PsychoCompLA' in the subject line) Website: http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/ Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 26-Jul-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.