21.2365, Calls: Comp Ling, Psycholing/USA

Thu May 27 14:27:58 UTC 2010

LINGUIST List: Vol-21-2365. Thu May 27 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.2365, Calls: Comp Ling, Psycholing/USA

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1)
Date: 26-May-2010
From: Neal Snider < nsnider at bcs.rochester.edu >
Subject: Empirical Evaluation of Usage-Based Constructionist Models

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 10:21:13
From: Neal Snider [nsnider at bcs.rochester.edu]
Subject: Empirical Evaluation of Usage-Based Constructionist Models

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Full Title: Empirical Evaluation of Usage-Based Constructionist Models 

Date: 06-Jan-2011 - 09-Jan-2011
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA 
Contact Person: Neal Snider
Meeting Email: nsnider at bcs.rochester.edu
Web Site: http://www.hlp.rochester.edu/lsa2011 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 16-Jul-2010 

Meeting Description:

2011 LSA Annual Meeting Organized Session: Empirical evaluations of 
usage-based constructionist models of language representation and 
processing. 

Call for Papers

Organizers:
Neal Snider, University of Rochester
Daniel Wiechmann, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena
Elma Kerz, RWTH-Universitat Aachen
T. Florian Jaeger, University of Rochester

Contact: nsnider at bcs.rochester.edu
URL: http://www.hlp.rochester.edu/lsa2011
The website will be updated as deadlines approach.

Deadlines:
Intention to submit: June 11
250-word abstracts:  July 16
Extended abstracts for the workshop website:  Dec 17
Send all abtracts and correspondence to the email above.

We are eliciting submissions for 10-minute talks that present novel empirical 
results and/or talks that propose methodological pathways that could be 
explored to amass empirical evidence on the matter. In addition, there will 
also be two longer 20-min slots that summarize existing data and argue for 
a specific theoretical interpretation (as opposed to others), so we also invite 
submissions for this format.

Final acceptance of the workshop proposal is pending.

Abstract:
Recent years have seen a growing interest in usage-based (UB) theories of 
language, which assume that language use plays a causal role in the 
development of linguistic systems over historical time. A central assumption 
of the UB-framework is the idea that shapes of grammars are closely 
connected to principles of human cognitive processing (Bybee 2006, 
Hawkins 2004). UB-accounts strongly gravitate towards sign- or 
construction-based theories of language, viz. theories that are committed to 
the belief that linguistic knowledge is best conceived of as an assembly of 
symbolic structures (e.g. Goldberg 2006, Langacker 2008, Sag et al. 2003). 
These constructionist accounts share (1) the postulation of a single 
representational format of all linguistic knowledge and (2) a strong 
commitment to psychological plausibility of mechanisms for the the learning, 
storage, and retrieval of linguistic units. They do, however, exhibit a 
considerable degree of variation with respect to their architectural and 
mechanistic details (cf. Croft & Cruse 2004).

This workshop will bring together linguists, psycholinguists, and 
computational linguists that commit to a constructionist UB framework to 
discuss which methodologies can best shed light on questions pertaining to 
the representational nature of constructions and the mechanisms involved 
in their on-line processing.

A key issue in this regard is the balancing of storage parsimony and 
processing parsimony: Maximizing storage parsimony implies greater 
computational demand and vice versa. The space of logical possibilities 
ranges from a complete inheritance model (minimal storage redundancy) to 
a full-entry model (maximal storage redundancy). Currently, the empirical 
validation of the theoretical situation is not yet conclusive: the 
representations involved in language processing involve extremely fine-
grained lexical-structural co-occurrences, for example frequent four-word 
phrases are processed faster than infrequent ones by both children 
(Bannard and Matthews 2008) and adults (Arnon and Snider 2010).  On the 
other hand, syntactic exemplar models (Bod 2006) overfit and 
undergeneralize compared to models that do not store all structures in the 
training data (cf. Post and Gildea 2009, although they found that Tree 
Substitution Grammar representations induced in a Bayesian framework still 
split the parsimony continuum towards greater redundancy).  Also, 
experimental work has argued that models of categorization that directly 
map phonetic dimensions to phonological categories (and therefore more 
directly reflect the statistics of the training data) do not predict human 
behavior as well as models that assume independent, intermediate 
representations (Toscano and McMurray 2010).

The workshop seeks to address these and related issues and asks which 
empirical methodologies could guide the further theoretical development, 
and intends to provide a forum for discussion for empirical and theoretical 
linguists embracing a usage-based constructionist approach to the study of 
language.

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