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Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 23:22:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: pcomp at hunter.cuny.edu
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************* Call for Participation **************

Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition

              PsychoCompLA-2007

http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/


August 1st at CogSci 2007 - Nashville, Tennessee

Workshop Topic:

The workshop is devoted to psychologically-motivated computational models of language acquisition. That is, models that are compatible with research in psycholinguistics, developmental psychology and linguistics.

Invited Speakers:

* Elissa Newport, University of Rochester
   Statistical language learning: Computational and
   maturational constraints
* Shimon Edelman, Cornell University
   The next challenges in unsupervised language
   acquisition: dependencies and complex sentences
* Robert Frank, Johns Hopkins University
   Transformational Networks
* Alex Clark, Royal Holloway University of London
   Learnable representations of languages: something old
   and something new
* Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania
   The next challenges in unsupervised language
   acquisition: dependencies and complex sentences
* Robert C. Berwick, MIT & Sandiway Fong, University of
   Arizona
   The Great (Penn Treebank) Robbery: When statistics is
   not enough
* Amy Perfors, MIT, Terry Regier, University of Chicago
   & Josh Tenenbaum, MIT
   Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus
* Dave Cochran, University of St. Andrews
   Selective Attention and Darwinised Data-Oriented
   Parsing
* Garrett Mitchener, College of Charleston & Misha
   Becker, University of North Carolina
   A computational model of learning verb subclasses in
   natural L1 acquisition
* Sharon Goldwater, Stanford University
   Distributional Models of Syntactic Category Acquisition:
   a Comparative Analysis
* Marco Tamburelli, University College London
   Are set-theoretic concepts still useful to children?
* Nicole Sager, Seth Herd & Eliana Colunga, University of
   Colorado at Boulder
   Modeling the Development of Bilingual and Second
   Language Reading
* Andrew Olney, University of Memphis
   Semantic Heads for Grammar Induction

Workshop Description:

This 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. By psychocomputational models we mean models that are compatible with, or might inform research in psycholinguistics, developmental psychology or linguistics.

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.

Although there has been a significant amount of presented research targeted at modeling the acquisition of word categories, morphology and phonology, research aimed at modeling syntax acquisition has just begun to emerge.

Workshop Organizer:
William Gregory Sakas, City University of New York
(sakas at hunter.cuny.edu)

Workshop Co-organizer:
David Guy Brizan, City University of New York
(dbrizan at gc.cuny.edu)

Topics and Goals:

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.

Contact: Psycho.Comp at hunter.cuny.edu

FYI, Related 2007 Meetings

Machine Learning and Cognitive Science of Language Acquisition
21-22 June, 2007

Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition
29 June, 2007

Exemplar-Based Models of Language Acquisition and Use
6-17 August, 2007

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