[Corpora-List] Final Call for Participation: Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition

[pcomp at hunter.cuny.edu]

**** FINAL CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ****

Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition (PsychoCompLA-2008)  
July 23rd at CogSci 2008 - Washington, D.C.  

http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/  
 
** New: List of presentations **

** Note that there is no registration fee for workshops at CogSci 2008.
** The Main Registration fee for CogSci 2008 covers workshops and tutorials.

Apologies for multiple postings  
 
* 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.  

* Special Theme:  
Although the workshop program speaks to many facets of psychocomputational  
language acquisition modeling, the theme of the workshop this year is:  
 
Computational resources: How much is just right, and does it matter?  
 
The computational resources (e.g., number of calculations per input datum, size 
of memory store, etc.) employed by current psychocomputational modeling efforts 
vary tremendously from model to model. However, two important questions have 
rarely been addressed. How well do a particular acquisition model's resources 
parallel the resources employed by a human language learner? And, how relevant 
(or not) is it to establish such a relationship?  
 
* Invited Speakers: 
 
-- Rens Bod, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of  
             Amsterdam  
-- Damir Cavar, University of Indiana and Zadar University 
-- Jeffery Lidz, University of Maryland  
-- Gary Marcus, New York University  
-- Josh Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology  
 
* Presentations

Towards Understanding the Role of Semantics in Natural Language Acquisition 
  Dana Angluin and Leonor Becerra-Bonache, Yale University 

Evaluating constructivist theory via unsupervised Bayesian grammar induction 
  Colin Bannard and Elena Lieven, Max Planck Institute For Evolutionary 
                                  Anthropology
  Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute For Evolutionary Anthropology and
                     School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester

Modelling semantic property acquisition from single linguistic exposures
  Marco Baroni, University of Trento
  Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa
  Brian Murphy and Massimo Poesio, University of Trento

Incorporating phrase structure into an n-gram model of syntax acquisition
  Xuƒn-Nga Cao-Kam, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Efficient learning of natural languages with lattice based representations 
  Alexander Clark, Royal Holloway University of London 

Can Statistical Parsers WOW! You: A Cognitive Assessment
  Sandiway Fong, University of Arizona
  Robert C. Berwick, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bayesian Decision Theory, Iterated Learning and Portuguese Clitics 
  Catherine Lai, University of Pennsylvania 

Computational Resources, How much is just right, and does it matter?
  William Gregory Sakas, Hunter College and The Graduate Center
                         City University of New York

Modeling Artificial Grammar Learning Results: Why Claims About Structural Cues Have Yet 
To Be Substantiated
  Sarah VanWagenen, Stanford University

Empirical evidence for recursive hierarchical structure in child language
  Willem Zuidema, Leiden University and Institute for Logic, Language and 
                  Computation, University of Amsterdam


* Workshop History:  
This is the fourth 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), and PsychoCompLA-2007 
held in Nashville, Tennessee as part of the 29th meeting of the Cognitive Science  
Society (CogSci-2007).  
 
* 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:  
Research on the following topics will be presented:  
 
- 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 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)  
 
* Program Committee:  
Rens Bod, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of  
Amsterdam, Netherlands  
David Guy Brizan, City University of New York, USA  
Damir Cavar, University of Indiana, USA and Zadar University, Croatia  
Gary Marcus, New York University  
Nick Chater, University of College London, UK  
Alex Clark, Royal Holloway University of London, UK  
Rick Dale, University of Memphis, USA  
Jeffery Lidz, University of Maryland, USA  
Gary Marcus, New York University, USA  
Lisa Pearl, University of California, Irvine, USA  
William Gregory Sakas, City University of New York, USA  
Josh Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA  
Charles D. Yang, University of Pennsylvania, USA  
 
* Contact: Psycho.Comp at hunter.cuny.edu  
with "PsychoCompLA-2008" somewhere in the subject line.


William Gregory Sakas
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics
Hunter College and the Graduate Center
City University of New York (CUNY)
Email: sakas at hunter.cuny.edu
Voice: 1 212 772.5211
Fax: 1 212 772.5219

David Guy Brizan
Computer Science
Graduate Center & Hunter College
dbrizan at gc.cuny.edu 

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