************************ Call for Abstracts ****************************

Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition (PsychoCompLA-2008)

July 23rd at CogSci 2008 - Washington, D.C.

Submission Deadline: June 15, 2007

http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/

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:

* Rens Bod, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of
Amsterdam, Netherlands
* Damir Cavar, University of Indiana, USA and Zadar University, Croatia
* Gary Marcus, New York University, USA
* Jeffery Lidz, University of Maryland, USA
* Gary Marcus, New York University, USA
* Josh Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Workshop History:

This is the fourth meeting of the Psychocomputational Models of Human Language
Acquisition workshop following PsychoCompLA-2004, held in Geneva, Switzerland
as part of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
(COLING-2004), PsychoCompLA-2005 as part of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2005) held in Ann Arbor,
Michigan where the workshop shared a joint session with the Ninth Conference
on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2005), and PsychoCompLA-2007
held in Nashville, Tennessee as part of the 29th meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society (CogSci-2007).


Workshop Description:

The 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.
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.

Special Theme:

Although the workshop program speaks to many facets of psychocomputational
language acquisition modeling, the theme of the workshop this year is:

* Computational resources: How much is just right, and does it matter?

The computational resources (e.g., number of calculations per input datum,
size of memory store, etc.) employed by current psychocomputational modeling
efforts vary tremendously from model to model. However, two important
questions have rarely been addressed. How well do a particular acquisition
model's resources parallel the resources employed by a human language learner?
And, how relevant (or not) is it to establish such a relationship?

Topics and Goals:

Abstracts that present research on (but not necessarily limited
to) the following topics are welcome:

* Models that address the acquisition of word-order;
* Models that combine parsing and learning;
* Formal learning-theoretic and grammar induction models that
incorporate psychologically plausible constraints;
* Comparative surveys that critique previously reported
studies;
* Models that have a cross-linguistic or bilingual perspective;
* Models that address learning bias in terms of innate
linguistic knowledge versus statistical regularity in the
input;
* Models that employ language modeling techniques from corpus
linguistics;
* Models that employ techniques from machine learning;
* Models of language change and its effect on language
acquisition or vice versa;
* Models that employ statistical/probabilistic grammars;
* Computational models that can be used to evaluate existing
linguistic or developmental theories (e.g., principles &
parameters, optimality theory, construction grammar, etc.)
* Empirical models that make use of child-directed corpora such
as CHILDES.

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.


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)


Program Committee:

Rens Bod, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of
Amsterdam, Netherlands
David Guy Brizan, City University of New York, USA
Damir Cavar, University of Indiana, USA and Zadar University, Croatia Gary
Marcus, New York University,
Nick Chater, University of College London, UK
Alex Clark, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Rick Dale, University of Memphis, USA
Jeffery Lidz, University of Maryland, USA
Gary Marcus, New York University, USA
Lisa Pearl, University of California, Irvine, USA
William Gregory Sakas, City University of New York, USA
Josh Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Charles D. Yang, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Submission details:

Authors are invited to submit abstracts of 1 page plus 1 page for data and
other supplementary materials. Abstracts should be anonymous, clearly titled
and no more than 500 words in length. Text of the abstract should fit on one
page, with a second page for examples, table, figures, references, etc. The
following formats are accepted: PDF, PS, and MS Word. Please include a cover
sheet (as a separate attachment) containing the title of your submission, your
name, contact details and affiliation. Send your submission electronically to

Email: Psycho.Comp@hunter.cuny.edu.
with PsychoCompLA-2008 Submission somewhere in the subject line.

Publication:

The accepted abstracts will appear in the online workshop proceedings. Full
papers of accepted abstracts will be considered in Fall 2008 for inclusion in
an issue of the new Cognitive Science Society Journal - topiCS - whose focus
will be psychocomputational modeling of human language acquisition.

Submission deadline: June 15, 2007

Contact: Psycho.Comp@hunter.cuny.edu
with PsychoCompLA-2008 somewhere in the subject line.