************* Call for Participation **************
Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition
PsychoCompLA-2007
http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/
August 1st at CogSci 2007 - Nashville, Tennessee
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:
* Elissa Newport, University of Rochester
Statistical language learning: Computational and
maturational constraints
* Shimon Edelman, Cornell University
The next challenges in unsupervised language
acquisition: dependencies and complex sentences
* Robert Frank, Johns Hopkins University
Transformational Networks
* Alex Clark, Royal Holloway University of London
Learnable representations of languages: something old
and something new
* Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania
The next challenges in unsupervised language
acquisition: dependencies and complex sentences
* Robert C. Berwick, MIT & Sandiway Fong, University of
Arizona
The Great (Penn Treebank) Robbery: When statistics is
not enough
* Amy Perfors, MIT, Terry Regier, University of Chicago
& Josh Tenenbaum, MIT
Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus
* Dave Cochran, University of St. Andrews
Selective Attention and Darwinised Data-Oriented
Parsing
* Garrett Mitchener, College of Charleston & Misha
Becker, University of North Carolina
A computational model of learning verb subclasses in
natural L1 acquisition
* Sharon Goldwater, Stanford University
Distributional Models of Syntactic Category Acquisition:
a Comparative Analysis
* Marco Tamburelli, University College London
Are set-theoretic concepts still useful to children?
* Nicole Sager, Seth Herd & Eliana Colunga, University of
Colorado at Boulder
Modeling the Development of Bilingual and Second
Language Reading
* Andrew Olney, University of Memphis
Semantic Heads for Grammar Induction
Workshop Description:
This 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. By
psychocomputational models we mean models that are compatible with, or might
inform research in psycholinguistics, developmental psychology or linguistics.
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.
Although there has been a significant amount of presented research targeted at
modeling the acquisition of word categories, morphology and phonology, research
aimed at modeling syntax acquisition has just begun to emerge.
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)
Topics and Goals:
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.
Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
FYI, Related 2007 Meetings
Machine Learning and Cognitive Science of Language Acquisition
21-22 June, 2007
Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition
29 June, 2007
Exemplar-Based Models of Language Acquisition and Use
6-17 August, 2007
