Call for participation: Psycho-computational Models of Human Language Acquisition

[Aris Xanthos]

[Apologies for multiple postings]


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                          Call for Participation

         Psycho-computational Models of Human Language Acquisition

  Workshop at ACL 2005   University of Michigan Ann Arbor   29-30 June 2005

             http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/

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Workshop Topic
--------------

The workshop, which is a follow-up to the successful workshop held at
COLING in 2004, will be devoted to psychologically motivated computational
models of language acquisition -- models that are compatible with, or
motivated by research in psycholinguistics, developmental psychology and
linguistics.

This year, the workshop is part of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2005) held in Ann Arbor,
Michigan and shares a joint session with the Ninth Conference on
Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2005).


Invited Talks
-------------
  * Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh
  * Brian MacWhinney, Carnegie Mellon University


Registration
------------

http://www.aclweb.org/acl2005/

Note that participants will have full access to CoNLL presentations
on Thursday, June 30th.


Workshop Description
--------------------

How children acquire the grammar of their native language(s) is one of
the most beguiling open questions of modern science. The principal goal of
this workshop is to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds who
are interested in the study of human language acquisition from a
computational perspective. Cross-discipline discussion will be encouraged.
Presented research draws computational linguistics, formal learning theory,
machine learning, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive
psychology and psycholinguistics.

Psycho-computational models of language acquisition are of particular
interest in light of recent results in developmental psychology which
suggest that very young infants are adept at detecting statistical patterns
in an audible input stream. This begs the question, to what extent can a
psychologically plausible statistical learning strategy be successfully
exploited in a "full-blown" psycho-computational acquisition model?


Conference program
------------------

* Wednesday, June 29, 2005 *

9:10-9:30    Opening Remarks

9:00-9:30    The Input for Syntactic Acquisition: Solutions from Language
              Change Modeling
              -- Lisa Pearl

9:30-10:00   Simulating Language Change in the Presence of Non-Idealized
              Syntax
              -- W. Garrett Mitchener

10:30-11:00  Break

11:00-11:30  Using Morphology and Syntax Together in Unsupervised Learning
              -- Yu Hu, Irina Matveeva, John GoldSmith and Colin Sprague

11:30-12:00  Refining the SED Heuristic for Morpheme Discovery: Another
              Look at Swahili
              -- Yu Hu, Irina Matveeva, John GoldSmith and Colin Sprague

12:00-12:30  A Connectionist Model of Language-Scene Interaction
              -- Marshall R. Mayberry, Matthew W. Crocker and Pia Knoeferle

12:30-2:00   Lunch

2:00-2:30    A Second Language Acquisition Model Using Example
              Generalization and Concept Categories
              -- Ari Rappoport and Vera Sheinman

2:30-3:30    Invited Talk

              Item Based Constructions and the Logical Problem
              -- Brian MacWhinney

3:30-4:00    Break

4:00-4:30    Statistics vs. UG in Language Acquisition: Does a Bigram
              Analysis Predict Auxiliary Inversion?
              -- Xuân-Nga Cao Kam, Iglika Stoyneshka, Lidiya Tornyova,
              -- William Gregory Sakas and Janet Dean Fodor

4:30-5:00    Climbing the path to grammar: a maximum entropy model of
              subject/object learning
              -- Felice Dell'Orletta, Alessandro Lenci, Simonetta Montemagni
              -- and Vito Pirrelli

5:00-5:30    The Acquisition and Use of Argument Structure Constructions:
              A Bayesian Model
              -- Afra Alishahi and Suzanne Stevenson

* Thursday, June 30, 2005 *

   - Joint Session with CoNLL

9:00-9:50    Invited talk: Mark Steedman

9:50-10:15   Steps Toward Deep Lexical Acquisition
              -- Sourabh Niyogi

10:15-10:40  Intentional Context in Situated Natural Language Learning
              -- Michael Fleischman and Deb Roy

   - Remaining CoNLL sessions

11:10-12:25  Morphology

2:10-2:50    Learning methods and architectures

2:50-3:30    Shared Task: Semantic Role Labeling

4:00-6:00    Shared Task: Semantic Role Labeling (con't)


Workshop Organizers
-------------------

* William Gregory Sakas (Chair), City University of New York, USA
* Alexander Clark, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
* James Cussens, University of York, UK (jc(at)cs.york.ac.uk)
* Aris Xanthos, University of Lausanne, Switzerland


Program Committee
-----------------

* Robert Berwick, MIT, USA
* Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
* Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge, UK
* Damir Cavar, Indiana University, USA
* Nick Chater, University of Warwick, UK
* Stephen Clark, University of Edinburgh, UK
* Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium and Tilburg
University, The Netherlands
* Elan Dresher, University of Toronto, Canada
* Jeff Elman, University of California, San Diego, USA
* Jerry Feldman, University of California, Berkeley, USA
* John Goldsmith, University of Chicago, USA
* John Hale, University of Michigan, USA
* Mark Johnson, Brown University, USA
* Vincenzo Lombardo, Universita di Torino, Italy
* Paola Merlo, University of Geneva, Switzerland
* Sandeep Prasada, City University of New York, USA
* Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
* Jenny Saffran, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
* Ivan Sag, Stanford University, USA
* Ed Stabler, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
* Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh, UK
* Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto, Canada
* Patrick Sturt, University of Glasgow, UK
* Charles Yang, Yale University, USA


Workshop contact:
-----------------

email: psycho.comp(at)hunter.cuny.edu
web: http://www.colag.cs.cuny.edu/psychocomp

or

William Gregory Sakas
Department of Computer Science, North 1008
Hunter College, City University of New York
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
USA

1 (212) 772.5211 - voice
1 (212) 772.5219 - fax

sakas(at)hunter.cuny.edu