Appel: EACL 2014 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2014 17:54:18 +0100
From: Thierry Poibeau <thierry.poibeau at ens.fr>
Message-Id: <C4CBDAC6-1DE2-462A-A406-59815BF11FA9 at ens.fr>

[Apologies for cross-postings]

==================================================
               Final Call for Papers
==================================================
            EACL 2014 Workshop on
Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning

                April 26, 2014
              Gothenburg, Sweden

      https://sites.google.com/site/cognitivews2014/

Deadline for Paper Submissions: January, 23rd, 2014 (11:59pm GMT -12)
Endorsed by the Special Interest Group of the ACL on Natural Language
Learning (SIGNLL)
---------------------------------------------------------------

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
cross linguistic 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. 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

---------------------------------------------------------------
SUBMISSIONS

We invite three different submission modalities:

* Regular long papers (8 content pages + 1 page for references): Long
  papers should report on original, solid and finished research
  including new experimental results, resources and/or techniques.

* Regular short papers (4 content pages + 1 page for references): Short
  papers should report on small experiments, focused contributions,
  ongoing research, negative results and/or philosophical discussion.

* System demonstration (2 pages): System demonstration papers should
  describe and document the demonstrated system or resources. We
  encourage the demonstration of both early research prototypes and
  mature systems, that will be presented in a separate demo session.

All submissions must be in PDF format and must follow the EACL 2014
formatting requirements (available at
http://www.eacl2014.org/files/eacl-2014-styles.zip).
We strongly advise the use of the provided Word or LaTeX template
files. For long and short papers, the reported research should be
substantially original. The papers will be presented orally or as
posters. The decision as to which paper will be presented orally and
which as poster will be made by the program committee based on the
nature rather than on the quality of the work.

Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information should be
included in the papers; self-reference should be avoided as well. Papers
that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without
review. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, where
no distinction will be made between papers presented orally or as
posters.

Submission and reviewing will be electronic, managed by the START
system:

    https://www.softconf.com/eacl2014/CogACLL/

Submissions must be uploaded onto the START system by the submission
deadline:

 January 23rd, 2014 (11:59pm GMT -12 hours)

Please choose the appropriate submission type from the START submission
page, according to the category of your paper.

---------------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT DATES

Jan 23, 2014    Long and Short Paper submission deadline
Feb 05, 2014    System Demonstrations submission deadline
Feb 20, 2014    Notification of acceptance
Mar 03, 2014    Camera-ready deadline
Apr 26,  2014    Workshop

---------------------------------------------------------------
PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Afra Alishahi         	Tilburg University (Netherlands)
Colin J Bannard         University of Texas at Austin (USA)
Marco Baroni         	University of Trento (Italy)
Robert Berwick         	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
Philippe Blache        	LPL, CNRS (France)    
Jim Blevins            	University of Cambridge (UK)
Antal van den Bosch     Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands)
Chris Brew            	Nuance Communications (USA)
Ted Briscoe         	University of Cambridge (UK)
Alexander Clark         Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)
Robin Clark         	University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Stephen Clark         	University of Cambridge (UK)
Matthew W. Crocker      Saarland University (Germany)
Walter Daelemans        University of Antwerp (Belgium)
Dan Dediu            	Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (The Netherlands)
Barry Devereux         	University of Cambridge (UK)
Benjamin Fagard         Lattice-CNRS (France)
Jeroen Geertzen         University of Cambridge (UK)
Ted Gibson         	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
Henriette Hendriks      University of Cambridge (UK)
Marco Idiart         	Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
Mark Johnson         	Brown University (USA)
Aravind Joshi         	University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Gianluca Lebani        	University of Pisa (Italy)
Igor Malioutov         	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe    The Ohio State University (USA)
Maria Alice Parente     Federal University of ABC (Brazil)
Massimo Poesio          University of Trento (Italy)
Brechtje Post         	University of Cambridge (UK)
Ari Rappoport         	The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
Anne Reboul        	L2C2-CNRS (France)
Kenji Sagae         	University of Southern California (USA)
Sabine Schulte im Walde University of Stuttgart (Germany)
Ekaterina Shutova       University of California, Berkeley (USA)
Maity Siqueira         	Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
Mark Steedman         	University of Edinburgh (UK)
Suzanne Stevenson       University of Toronto (Canada)
Remi van Trijp        	Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris (France)
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)
Alessandra Zarcone      University of Stuttgart (Germany)

---------------------------------------------------------------
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS AND CONTACT

Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy)
Muntsa Padró (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
Thierry Poibeau (LATTICE-CNRS, France)
Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)

For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email
to cognitive2014 at gmail.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Message diffuse par la liste Langage Naturel <LN at cines.fr>
Informations, abonnement : http://www.atala.org/article.php3?id_article=48
English version       : 
Archives                 : http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/ln.html
                                http://liste.cines.fr/info/ln

La liste LN est parrainee par l'ATALA (Association pour le Traitement
Automatique des Langues)
Information et adhesion  : http://www.atala.org/

ATALA décline toute responsabilité concernant le contenu des
messages diffusés sur la liste LN
-------------------------------------------------------------------------