Call for Papers: EACL Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition

[afra alishahi]

1st Call for Papers

EACL 2009 Workshop on COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF COMPUTATIONAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION


30 or 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 language acquisition

* 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 19, 2008 using the submission webpage
that will be available soon.

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: 19 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)