Second Call for Papers
Special issue of the journal Traitement automatique des Langues (TAL)

   COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES

Guest editors: T. Poibeau  (Lattice, France)
           & S. Vasishth (Univ. of Postdam, Germany)

Submission deadline : March 31st, 2015

Natural language understanding is one of the key problems both in
cognitive science and in computational linguistics. If both fields do
share common methods, the scientific goals are actually different.

In computational linguistics, the last decade has seen the rise of
quantitative and statistical methods leading to significative advances
in applied sub-fields such as speech recognition, machine translation or
information retrieval among others. This line of research has greatly
taken advantage of its ability to process very large amounts of data
that can be considered close to truly natural data.

Even if this new generation of models is sometimes inspired by
linguistic or psycholinguistic theories, it generally brings little or
no explanation to the broader question of understanding the natural
language competence.

On the other hand, language studies in cognitive science and in
psycholinguistics try to better understand the mechanisms underlying
natural language (including their neural basis) and more specifically
its acquisition by means of experimental investigations. One of the
novel aspects in several recent works is to use computational models
similar to those used in computational linguistics.

This special issue is dedicated to get a better picture of the
relationships between these two research environments. It specifically
raises two questions: 'what is the potential contribution of
computational-linguistics-inspired language modeling to cognitive
science' and conversely: 'what is the influence of cognitive science in
contemporary computational linguistics' ?

The call targets specifically contributions on actual applications of
methods from computational linguistics to the modelling of cognitive
phenomena and on the other hand on application of cognitive theories to
the computational modeling of language. The call addresses all aspects
of language modeling from speech to discourse.

Topics include, but are not limited to :

- Computational models of natural language acquisition, word clustering
and word segmentation
- Psycholinguistically motivated phonetic, phonological, morphological
syntactic, semantic, pragmatic studies of language
- Statistical and probabilistic modeling of factors encouraging one
production or interpretation over its competitors
- Models of language emergence, change and evolution
- Models of language processing and surprisal
- Experimental or corpus driven modeling and analysis of language

The call seeks for original papers gathering modeling aspects with
empirical or experimental aspects. It also targets theoretical or
methodological questions that would allow us to build bridges between
the two fields.

CONTACT

Thierry Poibeau     (thierry.poibeau@ens.fr)
Shravan Vasishth    (vasishth@rz.uni-potsdam.de)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE (to be completed)

F. Alario (LPC, Univ. Aix-Marseille, France)
A. Alishahi (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
M. Amblard (LORIA, Univ. de Lorraine, France)
P. Blache (LPL, Aix-en-Provence, France)
A. Christophe (LSCP, Paris, France)
S. Colonna (SFL, Univ. Paris 8, France)
I. Dautriche (LSCP, Paris, France)
E. Dupoux (LSCP, Paris, France)
T. François (Cental, UCL, Belgium)
B. Gaume (CLLE-ERSS, Toulouse, France)
J. Ginzburg (CLILLAC, Univ. Paris 7, France)
M. Grant (McGill University, Canada)
J. Hale (Cornell University, USA)
B. Hemforth (LLF, Univ. Paris 7, Paris)
P. Logacev (Potsdam University, Germany)
F. Pellegrino (DDL, Lyon, France)
D. Reitter (Penn State University, USA)
E. Shutova (U. Berkeley, USA)
J. Thuilier (ALC, Univ. Rennes 2, France)
A. Villavicencio (UFRGS, Brazil)
T. von der Malsburg (UC San Diego, USA)
M. Zock (LIF, Marseille, France)

THE JOURNAL

TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues / Natural Language Processing)
is a forty year old international journal published by ATALA (French
Association for Natural Language Processing) with the support of CNRS
(National Centre for Scientific Research). It has moved to an electronic
mode of publication, with printing on demand. This affects in no way its
reviewing and selection process.

IMPORTANT DATES 

- submission of contributions:   March 31st 2015
- first notification to authors: June 15th 2015
- revised versions:              July 30th 2015
- final decision:                September 15th 2015
- final versions:                October 15th 2015
- publication:                   Winter 2015

LANGUAGE

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or French. French-speaking
authors are requested to submit their contributions in French.

PAPER SUBMISSION

Papers must describe original, completed, and unpublished work. Each
submission will be reviewed by two programme committee members.

Papers must be submitted on Sciencesconf platform
     http://tal-55-3.sciencesconf.org/
To upload a paper, you will need to have an account on the
sciencesconf platform.

*** TAL has adopted double-blind review. The submitted papers should
  be anonymized. ***

Accepted papers will be maximum 25 pages long in PDF. Style sheets are
available for download on the Web site of the TAL journal
(http://www.atala.org/IMG/zip/tal-style.zip)