COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF COMPUTATIONAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Participation
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Country: 
Greece
City: 
Athens
Submission Deadline: 
Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Call for participation

EACL-2009 Workshop on

COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF COMPUTATIONAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

31 March 2009, Athens, Greece

Workshop Description
====================

This workshop is focused on the relevance of computational learning methods
for research on human language acquisition. Developing and applying such
computational techniques that can improve our understanding of human
language acquisition will not only benefit cognitive sciences in general,
but will also reflect back to NLP and place us in a better position to
develop useful language models.

The workshop aims to bring together researchers from the diverse fields of
NLP, machine learning, artificial intelligence, (psycho)linguistics, etc.
who are interested in the relevance of computational techniques for
understanding human language learning. The workshop is intended to bridge
the gap between the computational and cognitive communities, promote
knowledge and resource sharing, and help initiate interdisciplinary
research projects. Success in this type of research requires close
collaboration between NLP and cognitive scientists. To this end,
interdisciplinary workshops can play a key role in advancing existing and
initiating new research. This was demonstrated by some successful events
like the previous edition of this workshop held at ACL 2007.

Workshop Programme
==================

- 9:20-9:30 Welcome

- 9:30-10:30 Invited Talk : "Conceptual Descriptions: Evidence from
Corpora, the Mind, and the Brain", Massimo Poesio (University of Essex and
University of Trento)

- 10:30-11:00 COFFEE BREAK

- 11:00-12:30 SESSION 2: Theoretical and practical aspects of language
acquisition * 11:00-11:30 "Towards a formal view of corrective feedback",
Staffan Larsson and Robin Cooper * 11:30-12:00 "A Collaborative Tool for
the Computational Modelling of Child Language Acquisition", Kris Jack *
12:00-12:30 "What's in a Message?", Stergos Afantenos and Nicolas Hernandez

- 12:30-14:00 LUNCH BREAK

14:00-15:00 Invited Talk : "Treebank Parsing and Knowledge of Language: A
Cognitive Perspective", Robert Berwick (Massassuchets Institute of
Technology, Joint work with Prof. Sandiway Fong, University of Arizona)

- 15:00-16:00 SESSION 3: Learnability and grammatical inference

* 15:00-15:30 "Another look at indirect negative evidence", Alexander Clark
and Shalom Lappin * 15:30-16:00 "Categorizing Local Contexts as a Step in
Grammatical Category Induction", Markus Dickinson and Charles Jochim

- 16:00-16:30 COFFEE BREAK

- 16:30-17:30 SESSION 4: Ecology of languages

* 16:30-17:00 "Darwinised Data-Oriented Parsing - Statistical NLP with
added sex and death", Dave Cochran * 17:00-17:30 "Language Diversity across
the Consonant Inventories: A Study in the Framework of Complex Networks",
Monojit Choudhury, Animesh Mukherjee, Anupam Basu, Niloy Ganguly, Ashish
Garg and Vaibhav Jalan

Workshop Chairs
===============

- Afra Alishahi
(University of Saarland, Germany)

- Thierry Poibeau
(CNRS and University Paris 13, France)

- Aline Villavicencio
(Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and University of Bath, UK)

Address any queries regarding the workshop to: cognitive2009 [at] gmail.com

Programme Committee
===================

- Colin J Bannard (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
Germany) - Marco Baroni (University of Trento, Italy) - Robert C. Berwick
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) - Jim Blevins (University of
Cambridge, UK) - Rens Bod (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) - Antal
van den Bosch (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) - Chris Brew (Ohio
State University, USA) - Ted Briscoe (University of Cambridge, UK) - Robin
Clark (University of Pennsylvania, USA) - Stephen Clark (University of
Oxford, UK) - Matthew W. Crocker (Saarland University, Germany) - James
Cussens (University of York, UK) - Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp,
Belgium and Tilburg University, The Netherlands) - Ted Gibson
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) - Henriette Hendriks
(University of Cambridge, UK) - Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, USA) - Marco Idiart (Federal University of Rio Grande
do Sul, Brazil) - Mark Johnson (Brown University, USA) - Aravind Joshi
(University of Pennsylvania, USA) - Anna Korhonen (University of Cambridge,
UK) - Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy) - Massimo Poesio
(University of Trento, Italy) - Brechtje Post (University of Cambridge, UK)
- Ari Rappoport (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) - Dan Roth
(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) - Kenji Sagae (University
of Southern California, USA) - Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of
Stuttgart, Germany) - Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK) - Suzanne
Stevenson (University of Toronto, Canada) - Patrick Sturt (University of
Edinburgh, UK) - Bert Vaux (University of Wisconsin, USA) - Charles Yang
(University of Pennsylvania, USA) - Menno van Zaanen (Macquarie University,
Australia) - Michael Zock (LIF, CNRS, Marseille, France)