27.1698, Calls: Cog Sci, Computational Ling, Lang Acq/Germany

Tue Apr 12 18:09:57 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1698. Tue Apr 12 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1698, Calls: Cog Sci, Computational Ling, Lang Acq/Germany

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Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2016 14:09:48
From: Aline Villavicencio [avillavicencio at inf.ufrgs.br]
Subject: ACL 2016 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning

Full Title: ACL 2016 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning 
Short Title: CogACLL 2016 

Date: 11-Aug-2016 - 11-Aug-2016
Location: Berlin, Germany 
Contact Person: Alessandro Lenci
Meeting Email: cognitive2016 at gmail.com
Web Site: http://sites.google.com/site/cognitivews2016 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition 

Call Deadline: 08-May-2016 

Meeting Description:

The human ability to acquire and process language has long attracted interest
and generated much debate due to the apparent ease with which such a complex
and dynamic system is learnt and used on the face of ambiguity, noise and
uncertainty. This subject raises many questions ranging from the nature vs.
nurture debate of how much needs to be innate and how much needs to be learned
for acquisition to be successful, to the mechanisms involved in this process
(general vs specific) and their representations in the human brain. There are
also developmental issues related to the different stages consistently found
during acquisition (e.g. one word vs. two words) and possible organizations of
this knowledge. These have been discussed in the context of first and second
language acquisition and bilingualism, with crosslinguistic studies shedding
light on the influence of the language and the environment.

The past decades have seen a massive expansion in the application of
statistical and machine learning methods to natural language processing (NLP).
This work has yielded impressive results in numerous speech and language
processing tasks, including e.g. speech recognition, morphological analysis,
parsing, lexical acquisition, semantic interpretation, and dialogue
management. The good results 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
change.

The use of computational modeling is a relatively recent trend 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. Many of the existing
computational models attempt to study language tasks under cognitively
plausible criteria (such as memory and processing limitations that humans
face), and to explain the developmental stages observed in the acquisition and
evolution of the language abilities. In doing so, computational modeling
provides insight into the plausible mechanisms involved in human language
processes, and inspires the development of better language models and
techniques. These investigations are very important since if computational
techniques can be used to improve our understanding of human language
acquisition and change, these will not only benefit cognitive sciences in
general but will reflect back to NLP and place us in a better position to
develop useful language models.

Success in this type of research requires close collaboration between the NLP,
linguistics, psychology and cognitive science communities. The workshop is
targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of computational techniques for
understanding first, second and bilingual language acquisition and language
change in normal and clinical conditions.

Workshop Organizers and Contact 

Anna Korhonen (University of Cambridge, UK)
Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy)
Brian Murphy (Queen's University Belfast, UK)
Thierry Poibeau (LATTICE-CNRS, France)
Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)

2nd Call for Papers:

http://sites.google.com/site/cognitivews2016

Deadline for Long and Short Paper Submissions: May 8, 2016 (11:59pm GMT -12)
Deadline for System Demonstrations: May 29, 2016  (11:59pm GMT -12)   

Invited Talk - Robert Berwick (MIT, USA) - Why Take a Chance?

This workshop is endorsed by SIGNLL, the Special Interest Group on Natural
Language Learning of the Association for 
Computational Linguistics.

The workshop is targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of
computational 
techniques for understanding first, second and bilingual language acquisition
and language change in normal and 
clinical conditions. Long and short papers are invited on, but not limited to,
the following topics:

- Computational learning theory and analysis of language learning and
organization
- Computational models of first, second and bilingual language acquisition
- Computational models of language changes in clinical conditions
- Computational models and analysis of factors that influence language
acquisition and use in different age groups and cultures
- Computational models of various aspects of language and their interaction
effect in acquisition, processing and change
- Computational models of the evolution of language
- Data resources and tools for investigating computational models of human
language processes
- Empirical and theoretical comparisons of the learning environment and its
impact on language processes
- Cognitively oriented Bayesian models of language processes
- 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 a cognitive perspective

Submission:

We invite three different submission modalities:

- Regular long papers (8 content pages + 1 page for references)
- Regular short papers (4 content pages + 1 page for references)
- System demonstration (2 pages) 

Important Dates: 

May 8, 2016: Long and Short Paper submission deadline
May 29, 2016: System Demonstrations submission deadline
June 5, 2016: Notification of acceptance
June 22, 2016: Camera-ready deadline
August 11, 2016: Workshop

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to
cognitive2016 at gmail.com

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