EACL 2014 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning

26 April 2014 Gothenburg, Sweden 

https://sites.google.com/site/cognitivews2014/

Deadline for Paper Submissions: January, 23rd, 2014 (11:59pm GMT -12)

Endorsed by the Special Interest Group of the ACL on Natural Language Learning (SIGNLL)

The human ability to acquire and process language has long attracted interest and generated much debate due to the apparent ease with which such a complex and dynamic system is learnt and used on the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. This subject raises many questions ranging from the nature vs. nurture debate of how much needs to be innate and how much needs to be learned for acquisition to be successful, to the mechanisms involved in this process (general vs specific) and their representations in the human brain. There are also developmental issues related to the different stages consistently found during acquisition (e.g. one word vs. two words) and possible organizations of this knowledge. These have been discussed in the context of first and second language acquisition and bilingualism, with cross linguistic studies shedding light on the influence of the language and the environment. The past decades have seen a massive expansion in the application of statistical and machine learning methods to natural language processing (NLP). This work has yielded impressive results in numerous speech and language processing tasks, including e.g. speech recognition, morphological analysis, parsing, lexical acquisition, semantic interpretation, and dialogue management. The good results have generally been viewed as engineering achievements. Recently researchers have begun to investigate the relevance of computational learning methods for research on human language acquisition and change. The use of computational modeling is a relatively recent trend boosted by advances in machine learning techniques, and the availability of resources like corpora of child and child-directed sentences, and data from psycholinguistic tasks by normal and pathological groups. Many of the existing computational models attempt to study language tasks under cognitively plausible criteria (such as memory and processing limitations that humans face), and to explain the developmental stages observed in the acquisition and evolution of the language abilities. In doing so, computational modeling provides insight into the plausible mechanisms involved in human language processes, and inspires the development of better language models and techniques. These investigations are very important since if computational techniques can be used to improve our understanding of human language acquisition and change, these will not only benefit cognitive sciences in general but will reflect back to NLP and place us in a better position to develop useful language models. Success in this type of research requires close collaboration between the NLP, linguistics, psychology and cognitive science communities. The workshop is targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of computational techniques for understanding first, second and bilingual language acquisition and language change in normal and clinical conditions. Long and short papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics: *Computational learning theory and analysis of language learning and organization *Computational models of first, second and bilingual language acquisition *Computational models of language changes in clinical conditions *Computational models and analysis of factors that influence language acquisition and use in different age groups and cultures *Computational models of various aspects of language and their interaction effect in acquisition, processing and change *Computational models of the evolution of language *Data resources and tools for investigating computational models of human language processes *Empirical and theoretical comparisons of the learning environment and its impact on language processes *Cognitively oriented Bayesian models of language processes *Computational methods for acquiring various linguistic information (related to e.g. speech, morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, and discourse) and their relevance to research on human language acquisition *Investigations and comparisons of supervised, unsupervised and weakly-supervised methods for learning (e.g. machine learning, statistical, symbolic, biologically-inspired, active learning, various hybrid models) from a cognitive perspective

SUBMISSIONS

We invite three different submission modalities: * Regular long papers (8 content pages + 1 page for references): Long papers should report on original, solid and finished research including new experimental results, resources and/or techniques. * Regular short papers (4 content pages + 1 page for references): Short papers should report on small experiments, focused contributions, ongoing research, negative results and/or philosophical discussion. * System demonstration (2 pages): System demonstration papers should describe and document the demonstrated system or resources. We encourage the demonstration of both early research prototypes and mature systems, that will be presented in a separate demo session. All submissions must be in PDF format and must follow the EACL 2014 formatting requirements (available at http://www.eacl2014.org/files/eacl-2014-styles.zip). We strongly advise the use of the provided Word or LaTeX template files. For long and short papers, the reported research should be substantially original. The papers will be presented orally or as posters. The decision as to which paper will be presented orally and which as poster will be made by the program committee based on the nature rather than on the quality of the work. Reviewing will be double-blind, and thus no author information should be included in the papers; self-reference should be avoided as well. Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, where no distinction will be made between papers presented orally or as posters. Submission and reviewing will be electronic, managed by the START system: https://www.softconf.com/eacl2014/CogACLL/ Submissions must be uploaded onto the START system by the submission deadline: January 23rd, 2014 (11:59pm GMT -12 hours) Please choose the appropriate submission type from the START submission page, according to the category of your paper. --------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT DATES Jan 23, 2014 Long and Short Paper submission deadline Feb 05, 2014 System Demonstrations submission deadline Feb 20, 2014 Notification of acceptance Mar 03, 2014 Camera-ready deadline Apr 26, 2014 Workshop

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Afra Alishahi Tilburg University (Netherlands) Colin J Bannard University of Texas at Austin (USA) Marco Baroni University of Trento (Italy) Robert Berwick Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) Philippe Blache LPL, CNRS (France) Jim Blevins University of Cambridge (UK) Antal van den Bosch Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands) Chris Brew Nuance Communications (USA) Ted Briscoe University of Cambridge (UK) Alexander Clark Royal Holloway, University of London (UK) Robin Clark University of Pennsylvania (USA) Stephen Clark University of Cambridge (UK) Matthew W. Crocker Saarland University (Germany) Walter Daelemans University of Antwerp (Belgium) Dan Dediu Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (The Netherlands) Barry Devereux University of Cambridge (UK) Benjamin Fagard Lattice-CNRS (France) Jeroen Geertzen University of Cambridge (UK) Ted Gibson Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) Henriette Hendriks University of Cambridge (UK) Marco Idiart Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) Mark Johnson Brown University (USA) Aravind Joshi University of Pennsylvania (USA) Gianluca Lebani University of Pisa (Italy) Igor Malioutov Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) Marie-Catherine de Marneffe The Ohio State University (USA) Maria Alice Parente Federal University of ABC (Brazil) Massimo Poesio University of Trento (Italy) Brechtje Post University of Cambridge (UK) Ari Rappoport The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) Anne Reboul L2C2-CNRS (France) Kenji Sagae University of Southern California (USA) Sabine Schulte im Walde University of Stuttgart (Germany) Ekaterina Shutova University of California, Berkeley (USA) Maity Siqueira Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) Mark Steedman University of Edinburgh (UK) Suzanne Stevenson University of Toronto (Canada) Remi van Trijp Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris (France) Shuly Wintner University of Haifa (Israel) Charles Yang University of Pennsylvania (USA) Beracah Yankama Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) Menno van Zaanen Tilburg University (Netherlands) Alessandra Zarcone University of Stuttgart (Germany)

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS AND CONTACT

Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa, Italy) Muntsa Padró (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) Thierry Poibeau (LATTICE-CNRS, France) Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) For any inquiries regarding the workshop please send an email to cognitive2014@gmail.com