Network-based Models of Cognitive and Social Dynamics of Language
Special Issue of Computer Speech and Language Journal

Guest Editors:


* Monojit Choudhury, Microsoft Research India
* Samer Hassan, University of North Texas
* Animesh Mukherjee, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
* Smaranda Muresan, Rutgers University

Aim and Scope

This special issue builds up on the special theme of the workshop "TextGraphs-4: Graph-based Algorithms for NLP" that is going to be held on 7th August 2009 in conjunction with ACL-IJCNLP 2009. The special theme of TextGraphs-4 is "Models of Social and Cognitive Dynamics of Languages in the Framework of Complex Networks". While some of the articles shall be directly chosen from the TextGraphs-4 submissions, we can still accommodate around four to five fresh submissions in the special issue. Please treat this call as an open invitation to submit to this special issue.

Cognitive dynamics of languages include topics focused primarily on language acquisition, which can be extended to language change (historical linguistics) and language evolution. Since the latter phenomena are also governed by social factors, we can further classify them under social dynamics of languages. In addition, social dynamics of languages also include topics such as mining the social networks of blogs and emails. The special issue will contain work that investigates any of the aforementioned phenomena using graph theory or complex networks as a tool. Example topics include, but are not limited to:

Lexical acquisition and growth of the mental lexicon

Phonological, syntactic and semantic acquisition

Lexical change

Applications of networks in modeling language variation and dialectometry

Effect of social structure on language change and evolution

Analysis of blog and email networks for IR and IE

More details can be found at the official website of the workshop http://www.textgraphs.org/ws09/index.html


Important dates:


Submission of articles: 15th October, 2009

Notification to authors: 15th January, 2010

Final version of accepted papers: 15th March, 2010

Submissions


All submissions should be formatted according to the Computer Speech and Language guidelines for papers, references,

and citations (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622808/authorinstructions) and should

be submitted using the Elsevier Editorial System for Computer Speech and Language (http://ees.elsevier.com/csl/). While
submitting please choose article type as "Special Issue: TextGraphs-4".

Contact Information

* Monojit Choudhury (monojitc@microsoft.com)
* Samer Hassan (samer@unt.edu)
* Animesh Mukherjee  (animeshm@gmail.com)
* Smaranda Muresan  (smuresan@rci.rutgers.edu)