PsychocompLA - 2009 *second* Call for Papers

[pcomp]

************** Second Call for Short Papers****************

Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition
(PsychoCompLA-2009)

July 28th & 29th at CogSci 2009 - Amsterdam, Netherlands

Submission Deadline: May 15, 2009

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

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
* Hinrich Scheutze, University of Stuttgart (TBC)

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.bod at uva.nl)
William Gregory Sakas, City University of New York  (sakas at
hunter.cuny.edu)
Workshop Co-Organizer:
Taylor Cassidy, City University of New York
(Pyscho.Comp at hunter.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.Comp at hunter.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.Comp at hunter.cuny.edu
    with  PsychoCompLA-2009  somewhere in the subj
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