19.1539, Calls: General Ling/Hong Kong; Computational Ling,Psycholing/USA

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LINGUIST List: Vol-19-1539. Sun May 11 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.1539, Calls: General Ling/Hong Kong; Computational Ling,Psycholing/USA

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1)
Date: 09-May-2008
From: Andy Chin < yue2008 at cityu.edu.hk >
Subject: The 13th Int'l Conference on Cantonese & Yue Dialects 

2)
Date: 09-May-2008
From: William Sakas < sakas at hunter.cuny.edu >
Subject: Psychocomputational Models of Language Acquisition

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 11 May 2008 21:10:22
From: Andy Chin [yue2008 at cityu.edu.hk]
Subject: The 13th Int'l Conference on Cantonese & Yue Dialects
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-1539.html&submissionid=177961&topicid=3&msgnumber=1  

Full Title: The 13th Int'l Conference on Cantonese & Yue Dialects 

Date: 18-Dec-2008 - 20-Dec-2008
Location: City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 
Contact Person: Sinya Cheung
Meeting Email: yue2008 at cityu.edu.hk
Web Site: http://www.rcl.cityu.edu.hk/yueconf2008 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Subject Language(s): Chinese, Yue (yue)

Call Deadline: 30-Jun-2008 

Meeting Description:

The 13th International Conference on Cantonese & Yue Dialects will be held on
December 18th to 20th 2008 at the City University of Hong Kong. The theme of
this year's conference is 'Multi-disciplinary Approach to Cantonese'. 

Call of Papers

The Conference is jointly organized by the Language Information Sciences
Research Centre and the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics of
the City University of Hong Kong. As host of the Conference, we cordially invite
scholars, experts and students who work on different disciplines to share their
research outputs and exchange their ideas that bear on Cantonese and Yue dialects.

Deadline of abstract submission: June 30 2008
Notification of acceptance: By August 30 2008

Details of the conference and the abstract format can be found at the conference
website: http://www.rcl.cityu.edu.hk/yueconf2008



	
-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 11 May 2008 21:10:28
From: William Sakas [sakas at hunter.cuny.edu]
Subject: Psychocomputational Models of Language Acquisition
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=19-1539.html&submissionid=177922&topicid=3&msgnumber=2 
	

Full Title: Psychocomputational Models of Language Acquisition 
Short Title: PsychoCompLA-2008 

Date: 23-Jul-2008 - 23-Jul-2008
Location: Washington, D.C., USA 
Contact Person: William Sakas
Meeting Email: Psycho.Comp at hunter.cuny.edu
Web Site: http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; General Linguistics;
Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Jun-2008 

Meeting Description:

Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition (PsychoCompLA-2008)
July 23rd at CogSci 2008 - Washington, D.C.
Submission Deadline: June 15, 2007 
http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/ 

Call for Abstracts

Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition (PsychoCompLA-2008)

July 23rd at CogSci 2008 - Washington, D.C.

Submission Deadline: June 15, 2007 

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

Workshop Topic:
The workshop is devoted to psychologically-motivated computational models of
language acquisition. That is, models that are compatible with research in
psycholinguistics, developmental psychology and linguistics. 

Invited Speakers:
- Rens Bod, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of
Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Damir Cavar, University of Indiana, USA and Zadar University, Croatia
- Gary Marcus, New York University, USA
- Jeffery Lidz, University of Maryland, USA
- Gary Marcus, New York University, USA
- Josh Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Workshop History:  
This is the fourth meeting of the Psychocomputational Models of Human Language
Acquisition workshop following PsychoCompLA-2004, held in Geneva, Switzerland as
part of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
(COLING-2004), PsychoCompLA-2005 as part of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2005) held in Ann Arbor, Michigan
where the workshop shared a joint session with the Ninth Conference on
Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2005), and PsychoCompLA-2007 held
in Nashville, Tennessee as part of the 29th meeting of the Cognitive Science
Society (CogSci-2007).

Workshop Description:
The workshop will present research and foster discussion centered around 
psychologically-motivated computational models of language acquisition, with 
an emphasis on the acquisition of syntax. In recent decades there has been a 
thriving research agenda that applies computational learning techniques to 
emerging natural language technologies and many meetings, conferences and
workshops in which to present such research. However, there have been only a few
(but growing number of) venues in which psychocomputational models of how humans
acquire their native language(s) are the primary focus. 
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 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. 

Special Theme:
Although the workshop program speaks to many facets of psychocomputational
language acquisition modeling, the theme of the workshop this year is: 

Computational resources: How much is just right, and does it matter? 

The computational resources (e.g., number of calculations per input datum, 
size of memory store, etc.) employed by current psychocomputational modeling
efforts vary tremendously from model to model. However, two important questions
have rarely been addressed. How well do a particular acquisition model's
resources parallel the resources employed by a human language learner? And, how
relevant (or not) is it to establish such a relationship? 

Topics and Goals:
Abstracts that present research on (but not necessarily limited to) the
following topics are welcome:

- Models that address the acquisition of word-order;
- Models that combine parsing and learning;
- Formal learning-theoretic and grammar induction models that  incorporate
psychologically plausible constraints; 
- Comparative surveys that critique previously reported studies; 
- Models that have a cross-linguistic or bilingual perspective;
- 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.

This workshop intends to bring together researchers from cognitive psychology,
computational linguistics, other computer/mathematical sciences, linguistics and
psycholinguistics working on all areas of language acquisition. Diversity and
cross-fertilization of ideas is the central goal. 

Workshop Organizer:
William Gregory Sakas, City University of New York (sakas at hunter.cuny.edu)  

Workshop Co-organizer:
David Guy Brizan, City University of New York (dbrizan at gc.cuny.edu) 

Program Committee:
Rens Bod, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of 
Amsterdam, Netherlands
David Guy Brizan, City University of New York, USA
Damir Cavar, University of Indiana, USA and Zadar University, Croatia Gary 
Marcus, New York University, 
Nick Chater, University of College London, UK
Alex Clark, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Rick Dale, University of Memphis, USA 
Jeffery Lidz, University of Maryland, USA
Gary Marcus, New York University, USA
Lisa Pearl, University of California, Irvine, USA
William Gregory Sakas, City University of New York, USA
Josh Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Charles D. Yang, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Submission details:
Authors are invited to submit abstracts of 1 page plus 1 page for data and 
other supplementary materials. Abstracts should be anonymous, clearly titled 
and no more than 500 words in length. Text of the abstract should fit on one 
page, with a second page for examples, table, figures, references, etc. The 
following formats are accepted: PDF, PS, and MS Word. Please include a cover
sheet (as a separate attachment) containing the title of your submission, your
name, contact details and affiliation. Send your submission electronically to

Email: Psycho.Comp at hunter.cuny.edu. 
with 'PsychoCompLA-2008 Submission' somewhere in the subject line.

Publication:
The accepted abstracts will appear in the online workshop proceedings. Full 
papers of accepted abstracts will be considered in Fall 2008 for inclusion in 
an issue of the new Cognitive Science Society Journal - topiCS - whose focus 
will be psychocomputational modeling of human language acquisition. 

Submission deadline: June 15, 2007 

Contact: Psycho.Comp at hunter.cuny.edu
with 'PsychoCompLA-2008' somewhere in the subject line.


 





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