25.1179, Confs: Cognitive Sci, Computational Ling, Language Acquisition, Psycholing, Linguistic Theories/Sweden

Mon Mar 10 15:31:56 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1179. Mon Mar 10 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.1179, Confs: Cognitive Sci, Computational Ling, Language Acquisition, Psycholing, Linguistic Theories/Sweden

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Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:31:00
From: Aline Villavicencio [avillavicencio at inf.ufrgs.br]
Subject: EACL 2014 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning

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EACL 2014 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning 
Short Title: Cognitive-2014 

Date: 26-Apr-2014 - 26-Apr-2014 
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden 
Contact: Aline Villavicencio 
Contact Email: cognitive2014 at gmail.com 
Meeting URL: https://sites.google.com/site/cognitivews2014/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Linguistic Theories; Psycholinguistics 

Meeting Description: 

The past decades have seen a massive expansion in the application of statistical and machine learning methods to natural language processing (NLP). This work has yielded impressive results in numerous speech and language processing tasks, including e.g. speech recognition, morphological analysis, parsing, lexical acquisition, semantic interpretation, and dialogue management. The good results have generally been viewed as engineering achievements. 

Recently researchers have begun to investigate the relevance of computational learning methods for research on human language acquisition and change. The use of computational modeling is a relatively recent trend boosted by advances in machine learning techniques, and the availability of resources like corpora of child and child-directed sentences, and data from psycholinguistic tasks by normal and pathological groups. Many of the existing computational models attempt to study language tasks under cognitively plausible criteria (such as memory and processing limitations that humans face), and to explain the developmental stages observed in the acquisition and evolution of the language abilities. In doing so, computational modeling provides insight into the plausible mechanisms involved in human language processes, and inspires the development of better language models and techniques. 

These investigations are very important since if computational techniques can be used to improve our understanding of human language acquisition and change, these will not only benefit cognitive sciences in general but will reflect back to NLP and place us in a better position to develop useful language models. 

Success in this type of research requires close collaboration between the NLP, linguistics, psychology and cognitive science communities. 

Call for Participation

Invited Speakers:

Philippe Blache, Aix-Marseille Université (France)
Alexander Clark, King’s College, London (UK)

Endorsed by the Special Interest Group of the ACL on Natural Language Learning (SIGNLL)

Registration:

http://eacl2014.org/registration

The Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning (CogACLL) is the fifth edition of related workshops that was first held at ACL 2007 in Prague, EACL 2009 in Athens, EACL 2012 in Avignon and as a standalone event in Paris 2013.

The workshop is targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of computational techniques for understanding first, second and bilingual language acquisition and change or loss in normal and pathological conditions. The human ability to acquire and process language has long attracted interest and generated much debate due to the apparent ease with which such a complex and dynamic system is learnt and used on the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. This subject raises many questions ranging from the nature vs. nurture debate of how much needs to be innate and how much needs to be learned for acquisition to be successful, to the mechanisms involved in this process (general vs specific) and their representations in the human brain. There are also developmental issues related to the different stages consistently found during acquisition (e.g. one word vs. two words) and possible organizations of this knowledge. These have been discussed in the context of first and second language acquisition and bilingualism, with cross linguistic studies shedding light on the influence of the language and the environment. The past decades have seen a massive expansion in the application of statistical and machine learning methods to natural language processing (NLP). This work has yielded impressive results in numerous speech and language processing tasks, including e.g. speech recognition, morphological analysis, parsing, lexical acquisition, semantic interpretation, and dialogue management. The good results have generally been viewed as engineering achievements. Recently researchers have begun to investigate the relevance of computational learning methods for research on human language acquisition and change. The use of computational modeling is a relatively recent trend
boosted by advances in machine learning techniques, and the availability of resources like corpora of child and child-directed sentences, and data from psycholinguistic tasks by normal and pathological groups.

Workshop Programme:

9:30  - 9:40
Opening and Introduction

9:40  - 10:30
Invited talk
''Challenging incrementality in human language processing: Two operations for a cognitive architecture''
Philippe Blache

10:30 – 11:00
Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:30
Session 1: Phonology, morphology and word segmentation

11:00 - 11:20
''A Brazilian Portuguese phonological-prosodic algorithm applied to deviant language acquisition: A case sudy''
Vera Vasilévski, Márcio José Araujo and Helena Ferro Blasi

11:20 - 11:40
''Bayesian inference as a cross-linguistic word segmentation strategy: Always learning useful things''
Lawrence Phillips and Lisa Pearl

11:40 - 12:00
''Learning the hyperparameters to learn morphology'' 
Stella Frank

12:00 - 12:30
''An explicit statistical model of learning lexical segmentation using multiple cues'' 
Çağrı Çöltekin and John Nerbonne

12:30 – 14:00
Lunch Break

14:00 – 14:50
Invited Talk
''Distributional learning as a theory of language acquisition''
Alexander Clark

14:50 – 15:20
Session 2: Lexical acquisition and language evolution

14:50 - 15:20
''A multi-modal corpus for the evaluation of computational models for (grounded) language acquisition processes''
Judith Gaspers, Maximilian Panzner, Andre Lemme, Philipp Cimiano, Katharina J. Rohlfing and Sebastian Wrede

15:20 – 15:45
Coffee Break

15:45 - 16:05
''Towards a computational model of grammaticalization and lexical diversity'' 
Christian Bentz and Paula Buttery

16:05 - 16:25
''How well can a corpus-derived co-occurrence network simulate human associative behavior?'' 
Gemma Bel Enguix, Reinhard Rapp and Michael Zock

16:25 - 16:45
''Agent-based modeling of language evolution'' 
Torvald Lekvam, Björn Gambäck and Lars Bungum

16:45 – 17:15
Session 3: Second language acquisition

16:45 - 17:15
''Missing generalizations: A supervised machine learning approach to L2 written production'' 
Daniel Wiechmann and Elma Kerz

17:15 – 17:30
Closing

Program Committee:

- Afra Alishahi, Tilburg University (Netherlands)
- Colin J Bannard, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
- Marco Baroni, University of Trento (Italy)
- Robert Berwick, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
- Philippe Blache, LPL, CNRS (France)    
- Jim Blevins, University of Cambridge (UK)
- Antal van den Bosch, Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands)
- Chris Brew, Nuance Communications (USA)
- Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge (UK)
- Alexander Clark, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
- Robin Clark, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
- Stephen Clark, University of Cambridge (UK)
- Matthew W. Crocker, Saarland University (Germany)
- Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp (Belgium)
- Dan Dediu, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (The Netherlands)
- Barry Devereux, University of Cambridge (UK)
- Benjamin Fagard, Lattice-CNRS (France)
- Jeroen Geertzen, University of Cambridge (UK)
- Ted Gibson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
- Henriette Hendriks, University of Cambridge (UK)
- Marco Idiart, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
- Mark Johnson, Brown University (USA)
- Aravind Joshi, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
- Gianluca Lebani, University of Pisa (Italy)
- Igor Malioutov, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
- Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, The Ohio State University (USA)
- Maria Alice Parente, Federal University of ABC (Brazil)
- Massimo Poesio, University of Trento (Italy)
- Brechtje Post, University of Cambridge (UK)
- Ari Rappoport, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
- Anne Reboul, L2C2-CNRS (France)
- Kenji Sagae, University of Southern California (USA)
- Sabine Schulte im Walde, University of Stuttgart (Germany)
- Ekaterina Shutova, University of California, Berkeley (USA)
- Maity Siqueira, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
- Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh (UK)
- Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto (Canada)
- Remi van Trijp, Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris (France)
- Shuly Wintner, University of Haifa (Israel)
- Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
- Beracah Yankama, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
- Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University (Netherlands)
- Alessandra Zarcone, University of Stuttgart (Germany)

Workshop Organizers and Contact:

- Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy)
- Muntsa Padró (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
- Thierry Poibeau (LATTICE-CNRS, France)
- Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to:

cognitive2014 at gmail.com

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