[Corpora-List] CFP for special issue on Computational Models of First Language Acquisition

[Alexander Clark]

(Apologies if you receive this more than once, but please forward to
people that might be interested)

Call for Papers

Computational Models of First Language Acquisition.
Special Issue of Research on Language and Computation

Editors:

Alexander Clark, Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University
of London
William Gregory Sakas, Hunter College and The
Graduate Center, City University of New York

The journal Research on Language and Computation invites submission of papers
for a special issue on Computational Models of Language Acquisition.


Background

Language acquisition has for a long time stood as one of the most
fundamental, beguiling, and surprisingly open questions of modern science.
  Recent advances in natural language processing, statistical parsing
and machine learning, together with the availability of
large corpora of child directed speech and other corpora, make a wide range
of computationally-oriented approaches to the study of this problem
available. In this special issue, we will provide a forum for the full range
of current approaches to this important field.

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, through simulation,
mathematically, the statistical analysis of corpora, etc., 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


We aim to publish papers that describe state of the art techniques in
computational models of language acquisition. These should be computationally
explicit but not necessarily implemented and these could be evaluated
empirically, theoretically or on the basis of a detailed case study.
 This special
issue should provide an interdisciplinary forum where researchers in
theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, natural language processing,
grammatical inference, machine learning and cognitive science can present
research on the computational modelling of first language acquisition.

We welcome papers from any of the current models of linguistic theorising:
standard and enriched context free models,  Principles and Parameters
models, Optimiality theory and reseachers working within the Minimalist
Program, and other approaches.


 Topics include but are not limited to;

* Models that address the acquisition of word-order;

* Models that combine parsing and learning;

* Formal learning-theoretic and grammar induction models that
use psychologically plausible models of the information available to the
learner;

* Comparative surveys that critique previously reported
studies;

* 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, or indeed adult corpora  as
contrasted with child-directed corpora.

Instructions

Submissions should be made online using Springer's Editorial Manager System,
available at http://www.editorialmanager.com/rolc/.

Length: 12,000 words (approximately 30 pages) for a standard submission
         4,000 words (approximately 10 pages) for a brief report

Important dates

Submission of full papers:  October 30, 2009
Notifications of decision: January 31, 2010
Revised versions due:  April 1, 2010
Second review: June 1 2010
Final versions:  August 1 2010
Publication:  Late 2010.

Further information:

Please contact Alexander Clark (alexc at cs.rhul.ac.uk) for any further
questions.




-- 
Alex Clark

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