Announcement: Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition

[William Gregory Sakas]

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                         Call for Participation                      
      
        Psycho-computational Models of Human Language Acquisition
      
      A COLING 2004 Workshop   Geneva Switzerland    28 August 2004
      
            http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/
      
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Workshop Topic 
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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
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  * Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp and Tilburg University
  * Elan Dresher, University of Toronto
  * Jerome A. Feldman, University of California at Berkeley
  * Charles D. Yang, Yale University

Registration
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http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/

Workshop Description 
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How children acquire the grammar of their native language(s) is one of the 
most beguiling open questions of modern science. The principal goal of this 
workshop is to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds who are 
interested in the study of human language acquisition from a computational 
perspective. Cross-discipline discussion will be encouraged. Presented 
research draws computational linguistics, formal learning theory, machine 
learning, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive psychology and 
psycholinguistics.

Psycho-computational models of language acquisition are of particular 
interest in light of recent results in developmental psychology which suggest 
that very young infants are adept at detecting statistical patterns in an 
audible input stream. This begs the question, to what extent can a 
psychologically plausible statistical learning strategy be successfully 
exploited in a "full-blown" psycho-computational acquisition model?

Accepted Papers (full text and presentation schedule available at   
     http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/program.html )
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  A Quantitative Evaluation of Naturalistic Models of Language 
  Acquisition; the Efficiency of the Triggering Learning 
  Algorithm Compared to a Categorial Grammar Learner
  -- Paula Buttery
  
  On Statistical Parameter Setting
  -- Damir Cavar, Joshua Herring,Toshikazu Ikuta, Paul Rodrigues 
  -- and Giancarlo Schrementi
  
  Putting Meaning into Grammar Learning
  -- Nancy Chang 
  
  Grammatical Inference and First Language Acquisition
  -- Alexander Clark 
  
  A Developmental Model of Syntax Acquisition in the Construction 
  Grammar Framework with Cross-Linguistic Validation in English 
  and Japanese
  -- Peter Ford Dominey and Toshio Inui 
  
  On the Acquisition of Phonological Representations
  -- B. Elan Dresher   
  
  Statistics Learning and Universal Grammar: Modeling Word 
  Segmentation
  -- Timothy Gambell and Charles Yang 
  
  Modelling Syntactic Development in a Cross-Linguistic 
  Context
  -- Fernand Gobet, Daniel Freudenthal and Julian M. Pine 
  
  A Computational Model of Emergent Simple Syntax: 
  Supporting the Natural Transition from the One-Word Stage to 
  the Two-Word Stage
  -- Kris Jack, Chris Reed and Annalu Waller 
  
  On a Possible Role for Pronouns in the Acquisition of Verbs
  -- Aarre Laakso and Linda Smith 
  
  Some Tests of an Unsupervised Model of Language Acquisition
  -- Bo Pedersen, Shimon Edelman, Zach Solan, David Horn 
  -- and Eytan Ruppin
  
  Modelling Atypical Syntax Processing
  -- Michael S. C. Thomas and Martin Redington 
  
  Combining Utterance-Boundary and Predictability Approaches 
  to Speech Segmentation
  -- Aris Xanthos
  
  Workshop Organizer
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    William Gregory Sakas, City University of New York
  
  Program Committee
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  * Robert Berwick, MIT, USA
  * Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
  * Ted Briscoe, University of Cambridge, UK
  * Damir Cavar, Indiana University, USA
  * Morten H. Christiansen, Cornell University, USA
  * Stephen Clark, University of Edinburgh, UK 
  * James Cussens, University of York, UK
  * Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium and Tilburg ersity, 
    The Netherlands
  * Jeffrey Elman, University of California, San Diego, USA
  * Gerard Kempen, Leiden University, The Netherlands and The Max Planck 
    Institute, Nijmegen
  * Vincenzo Lombardo, University of Torino, Italy
  * Larry Moss, University of Indiana, USA
  * Miles Osborne, University of Edinburgh, UK 
  * Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
  * Ivan Sag, Stanford University, USA
  * Jeffrey Siskind, Purdue University, USA
  * Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh, UK
  * Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
  * Charles Yang, Yale University, USA
  
  Contact:
  --------
  Psycho.Comp at hunter.cuny.edu
     or sakas at hunter.cuny.edu
  
  http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/
  
  

William Gregory Sakas, Ph.D.
Computer Science and Linguistics
Hunter College and the Graduate Center
City University of New York

Voice:  (212) 772.5211
Fax:    (212) 772.5219
Email:  sakas at hunter.cuny.edu
WWW:    http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/cs/Faculty/Sakas/