Extended Deadline: EACL 2009 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects ofComputational Language Acquisition

[Aline Villavicencio]

*** Paper submission deadline extended to 23 December, 2008 ***

EACL 2009 Workshop on COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF COMPUTATIONAL LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION

31 March 2009
Athens, Greece

http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~poibeau/cognitive/

-----------------------------------------------

Workshop Description
====================

This workshop is focused on the relevance of computational learning
methods for research on human language acquisition. Developing and
applying such computational techniques that can improve our
understanding of human language acquisition will not  only benefit
cognitive sciences in general, but will also reflect back to NLP and
place us in a better position to develop useful language models.

The workshop aims to bring together researchers from the diverse
fields of NLP, machine learning, artificial intelligence,
(psycho)linguistics, etc. who are  interested in the
relevance of computational techniques for understanding human language
learning.

The workshop is intended to bridge the gap between the computational
and cognitive communities, promote knowledge and resource sharing,
and help initiate  interdisciplinary research projects. Success in
this type of research requires close  collaboration between
NLP and cognitive scientists. To this end, interdisciplinary workshops
can play a key role in advancing existing and initiating new research.
This was  demonstrated by some successful events like the previous
edition of this workshop held at ACL 2007.


Areas of interest
=================

Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

- Computational learning theory and analysis of language learning

- Computational models of human (first, second and bilingual) language
acquisition

- Computational models of various aspects of language acquisition, and
their interaction with each other

- Computational models of the evolution of language

- Data resources and tools for investigating computational models of
human languageacquisition

- Empirical and theoretical comparisons of the learning environment
and its impact on the acquisition task

- Computational methods for acquiring various linguistic information
(related to e.g. speech, morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, and
discourse) and  their relevance to research on human language acquisition

- Investigations and comparisons of supervised, unsupervised and
weakly-supervised methods for learning (e.g. machine learning,
statistical, symbolic, biologically-inspired, active learning,
various hybrid models) from  the cognitive aspect

Papers can cover one or more of these areas.

Submission Information
======================

Papers should describe original work and should indicate the state of
completion of the reported results. In particular, any overlap with
previously published  work should be clearly mentioned. Submissions
will be judged on correctness, novelty,  technical strength, clarity
of presentation, usability, and  significance/relevance to the workshop.

Submissions should follow the two-column format of the EACL 2009
main-conference proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages,
including  references. We strongly recommend the use of either the
LaTeX style file or the Microsoft-Word Style file, which
can be found at http://www.eacl2009.gr/conference/authors.

The reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include
the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self- citations
and other references  that could reveal the author's identity should
be avoided.

Submission will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted
papers is Adobe PDF. Papers must be submitted no later than December
23, 2008 using  the following submission
webpage  https://www.softconf.com/eacl09/cog-acq/

Submissions will be reviewed by 3 members of the Program Committee.
Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding
how to produce camera-ready  versions of their
papers for inclusion in the EACL workshop proceedings.

Notification of receipt will be emailed to the contact author.


Important Dates
===============

- Paper submission deadline: 23 December 2008
- Acceptance notification sent: 30 January 2009
- Final version deadline: 13 February 2009
- Workshop date: 30 or 31 March 2009


Workshop Chairs
===============

- Thierry Poibeau (CNRS and University Paris 13, France)
- Afra Alishahi (University of Saarland, Germany))
- Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
and University of
Bath, UK)

Address any queries regarding the workshop to:
cognitive2009 at gmail.com


Program Committee
=================

- Colin J Bannard (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
Germany)
- Marco Baroni (University of Trento, Italy)
- Robert C. Berwick (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
- Jim Blevins (University of Cambridge, UK)
- Rens Bod (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
- Chris Brew (Ohio State University, USA)
- Ted Briscoe (University of Cambridge, UK)
- Robin Clark (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
- Stephen Clark (University of Oxford, UK)
- Matthew W. Crocker (Saarland University, Germany)
- James Cussens (University of York, UK)
- Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium and Tilburg University,
The
Netherlands)
- Ted Gibson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
- Henriette Hendriks (University of Cambridge, UK)
- Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
- Marco Idiart (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
- Mark Johnson (Brown University, USA)
- Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
- Anna Korhonen (University of Cambridge, UK)
- Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy)
- Massimo Poesio (University of Trento, Italy)
- Brechtje Post (University of Cambridge, UK)
- Ari Rappoport (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
- Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
- Kenji Sagae (University of Southern California, USA)
- Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
- Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK)
- Suzanne Stevenson (University of Toronto, Canada)
- Patrick Sturt (University of Edinburgh, UK)
- Bert Vaux (University of Wisconsin, USA)
- Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
- Menno van Zaanen (Macquarie University, Australia)
- Michael Zock (LIF, CNRS, Marseille, France)