Call for Participation - EACL 2012 Workshop on Computational Models of Language Acquisition and Loss

[avillavicencio at inf.ufrgs.br]

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Call for Participation

EACL 2012 Workshop on Computational Models
of Language Acquisition and Loss

Avignon, France
April 24, 2012

Invited Speakers:
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy)

https://sites.google.com/site/eaclcogws/home
Registration: http://eacl2012.org/registration/index.html
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The past decades have seen a massive expansion in the
application of statistical and machine learning methods
to speech and natural language processing. This work
has yielded impressive results which 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 loss, 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.

This 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. This is the third edition of this workshop
that was first held at ACL 2007 in Prague and then in EACL 2009
in Athens.

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

8:55 Opening Session

Session 1: Language Evolution and Learning
9:00 Distinguishing Contact-Induced Change from Language Drift in  
Genetically Related Languages
T. Mark Ellison and Luisa Miceli
9:30 Empiricist Solutions to Nativist Puzzles by means of Unsupervised TSG
Rens Bod and Margaux Smets

10:00 Coffee Break

10:30 Invited Talk I: Probabilistic Models of Grammar Acquisition
Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK)

11:30-12:30 Session 2: Demonstration Session

*A Morphologically Annotated Hebrew CHILDES Corpus
Aviad Albert, Brian MacWhinney, Bracha Nir and Shuly Wintner
*Searching the Annotated Portuguese Childes Corpora
Rodrigo Wilkens
*Webservices for Bayesian Learning
Muntsa Padro and Nuria Bel
*An annotated English child language database
Aline Villavicencio, Beracah Yankama, Rodrigo Wilkens, Marco Idiart
and Robert Berwick

12:30 Lunch Break

14:00 Invited Talk II: Unseen features. Collecting semantic data from  
congenital blind subjects
Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy)

Session 3: Phonology and Syntax I
15:00 PHACTS about activation-based word similarity effects
Basilio Calderone and Chiara Celata
15:15 I say have you say tem: profiling verbs in children data in  
English and Portuguese
Rodrigo Wilkens and Aline Villavicencio

15:30 Coffee Break

Session 4: Phonology and Syntax II

16:00 Get out but don’t fall down: verb-particle constructions in  
child language
Aline Villavicencio, Marco Idiart, Carlos Ramisch, Vıtor Araujo,  
Beracah Yankama
and Robert Berwick

16:30 Phonologic Patterns of Brazilian Portuguese: a grapheme to  
phoneme converter based study
Vera Vasilevski

17:00 Closing

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Afra Alishahi, Tilburg University (Netherlands)
* Colin J Bannard, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
* Marco Baroni, University of Trento (Italy)
* Jim Blevins, University of Cambridge (UK)
* Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
* Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University (Netherlands)
* Alexander Clark, Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
* Robin Clark, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
* Matthew W. Crocker, Saarland University (Germany)
* James Cussens, University of York (UK)
* Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp (Belgium) and Tilburg  
University (Netherlands)
* Barry Devereux, University of Cambridge (UK)
* Sonja Eisenbeiss, University of Essex (UK)
* Afsaneh Fazly, University of Toronto (Canada)
* Cynthia Fisher, University of Illinois (USA)
* Jeroen Geertzen, University of Cambridge (UK)
* Henriette Hendriks, University of Cambridge (UK)
* Marco Idiart, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
* Aravind Joshi, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
* Shalom Lappin, King's College London (UK)
* Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa (Italy)
* Igor Malioutov, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
* Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Stanford University (USA)
* Fanny Meunier, Lumière Lyon 2 University (France)
* Brian Murphy, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
* Maria Alice Parente, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
* Massimo Poesio, University of Essex (UK)
* 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)
* Ekaterina Shutova, University of Cambridge (UK)
* Maity Siqueira, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
* Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh (UK)
* 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)
* Michael Zock, LIF, CNRS, Marseille (France)

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS AND CONTACT

* Robert Berwick, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
* Anna Korhonen, University of Cambridge (UK)
* Thierry Poibeau, LaTTiCe-CNRS (France) and University of Cambridge (UK)
* Aline Villavicencio, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and
Massachussets Institute of Technology (USA)

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to
cognitivemodels2012 at gmail.com



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