PsychoCompLA-2008 (previous meetings: PsychoCompLA-2004, PsychoCompLA-2005, PsychoCompLA-2007)

Organized by the CUNY-CoLAG research group

Wednesday July 23rd at CogSci 2008 - Washington, DC

Submission deadline: Passed.

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.

Workshop 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?

Invited Speakers:

Rens Bod
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam

Damir Cavar
University of Indiana and Zadar University

Jeffery Lidz
University of Maryland

Gary Marcus
New York University

Josh Tenenbaum
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Presentations:

Towards Understanding the Role of Semantics in Natural Language Acquisition

Dana Angluin and Leonor Becerra-Bonache, Yale University

Evaluating Constructivist Theory via Unsupervised Bayesian Grammar Induction

Colin Bannard and Elena Lieven, Max Planck Institute For Evolutionary Anthropology

Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute For Evolutionary Anthropology and School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester

Modelling Semantic Property Acquisition From Single Linguistic Exposures

Marco Baroni, University of Trento

Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa

Brian Murphy and Massimo Poesio, University of Trento

Incorporating Phrase Structure into an N-Gram Model of Syntax Acquisition

Xuƒn-Nga Cao-Kam, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Efficient Learning of Natural Languages with Lattice Based Representations

Alexander Clark, Royal Holloway University of London

Can Statistical Parsers WOW! You: A Cognitive Assessment

Sandiway Fong, University of Arizona

Robert C. Berwick, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bayesian Decision Theory, Iterated Learning and Portuguese Clitics

Catherine Lai, University of Pennsylvania

Computational Resources, How Much is Just Right, and Does It Matter?

William Gregory Sakas, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Modeling Artificial Grammar Learning Results: Why Claims About Structural Cues Have Yet to be Substantiated

Sarah VanWagenen, Stanford University

Empirical Evidence for Recursive Hierarchical Structure in Child Language

Willem Zuidema, Leiden University and Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam

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 and PsychoCompLA-2007 held in Nashville, Tennessee as part of the 29^th 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.

Topics and Goals:

· 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

Contact: Psycho.Comp@hunter.cuny.edu

with PsychoCompLA-2008 somewhere in the subject line.