27.2886, Calls: Cog Sci, Computational Ling, Pragmatics, Psycholing, Semantics/USA

Thu Jul 7 14:02:00 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2886. Thu Jul 07 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2886, Calls: Cog Sci, Computational Ling, Pragmatics, Psycholing, Semantics/USA

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Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2016 10:01:53
From: Judith Degen [jdegen at stanford.edu]
Subject: Workshop: Bridging Computational and Psycholinguistic Approaches to the Study of Meaning

Full Title: Workshop: Bridging Computational and Psycholinguistic Approaches to the Study of Meaning 

Date: 17-Feb-2017 - 18-Feb-2017
Location: Stanford, USA 
Contact Person: Judith Degen
Meeting Email: cogscimeaning at gmail.com
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/site/comppsychlingmeaning/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics 

Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2016 

Meeting Description:

In recent years, the study of meaning has seen rapid advances in two still
largely disconnected areas: probabilistic semantics/pragmatics (Goodman &
Lassiter 2015; Franke & Jäger 2016) and psycholinguistics (Sedivy 2014). Both
of these areas have drawn on traditional formal semantics/pragmatics for
inspiration, especially Grice's original insights, while adding other
perspectives from cognitive science. On the one hand, the burgeoning field of
probabilistic pragmatics has been hugely successful in modeling a wide variety
of phenomena as the outcome of iterated Bayesian reasoning between speakers
and listeners -- including scalar implicature, M-implicature, figurative
meaning, pronoun resolution; as well as the interpretation of gradable
predicates, quantifiers, spatial relations, generics, and referring
expressions (e.g., Frank & Goodman 2012; Goodman & Stuhlmüller 2013; Degen et
al 2013; Lassiter & Goodman 2013; Carstensen et al 2014; Kao et al 2014; Qing
& Franke 2014; Kehler & Rohde 2015; Potts et al 2015; Bergen et al 2016). On
the other hand, psycholinguistic research in experimental semantics and
pragmatics is painting an ever more complex picture of the interactions of
multiple factors in the computation of speaker meaning, including literal
meaning, perspective-taking, prosody, availability of alternatives, the
Question Under Discussion, world knowledge, and speaker-specific
idiosyncrasies (Heller et al 2008; Grodner & Sedivy 2011; Brown-Schmidt 2012;
Kurumada et al 2014; Degen & Tanenhaus 2015; Pogue et al 2016; Yildirim et al
2016).

Despite the two areas' very similar goals -- to understand a) how listeners
compute pragmatic inferences from the observed signal, and b) how speakers
choose an utterance to produce in the first place -- there has been a
surprising disconnect between the communities. This is partly attributable to
different foci: the computational community has aimed at providing
proof-of-concept models for the outcome of inference processes in various
domains, testing these models on judgments of speaker meaning collected
through offline measures. The psycholinguistic community, in contrast, has
focused for the most part on online processing, trying to establish which
types of information from the signal and the extra-linguistic context are
processed at which point in time. 

The workshop aims to work towards an integrated cognitive science of meaning.
To this end, researchers who study meaning from a variety of perspectives will
come together with the goal of building mutually beneficial bridges between
the communities. At least the following questions will be discussed:

- How can rational, probabilistic models of meaning be extended to online
processing? Should they be?
- What insights from rational models of language use in other domains (e.g.,
syntactic or acoustic processing) do or do not apply to the study of meaning?
- What well-known phenomena from psycholinguistics should modelers of meaning
be more aware of and try to integrate (e.g., individual differences, resource
limitations, incrementality)?
- In building theories of meaning, what can we learn from data/insights from
acquisition, language change, language variation, sociolinguistics, language
disorders, brain imaging data, and NLP?

Invited speakers:

Sarah Brown-Schmidt (Vanderbilt University)
Judith Degen (Stanford University)
Vera Demberg (Saarland University)
Ashwini Deo (Yale University)
Mike Frank (Stanford University)
Michael Franke (University of Tübingen)
Noah Goodman (Stanford University)
Chigusa Kurumada (University of Rochester)
Dan Lassiter (Stanford University)

Funded by CSLI (Center for the Study of Language and Information)

Call for Papers: 

Authors are invited to submit abstracts for posters relevant to the workshop's
topics by November 1, 2016. We welcome posters presenting theoretical,
experimental and/or computational research on any aspect of meaning
(production/generation, comprehension/interpretation, acquisition, language
change). Poster submissions should be sent to cogscimeaning at gmail.com with the
word 'Abstract' in the subject line. Poster abstracts should be limited to 300
words and submitted in the body of the message in plain text. Please be sure
to indicate author names and affiliations in the message.

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