********************************************************* CALL for PAPERS ACL 2007 Workshop on COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF COMPUTATIONAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 29th June, 2007 Prague, Czech Republic http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~alk23/cognitive/cognitive.htm ********************************************************* Workshop Description 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. These investigations are very important since if computational techniques can be used to improve our understanding of human language acquisition, this 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. Some examples of recent investigations include: * statistical lexical acquisition and analysis of corpora to gain more accurate descriptions of the learning environment, to investigate the lexical properties of developmental stages, and to quantify differences between child and adult productions; * computational models which investigate the capabilities of particular theories (notably the benefit and practicality of Universal Grammar); * biologically motivated neural networks which investigate the acquisition of specific lexical constructions. Success in this type of research requires close collaboration between NLP and cognitive scientists. To this end, interdiciplinary workshops can play a key role in advancing existing and initiating new research. This was demonstrated by two successful workshops held at COLING 2004 and ACL 2005 which focussed on psycho- computational models of human language acquisition. However, in general, there has been little space at major NLP conferences for cognitive aspects of language acquisition. Even CoNLL which was originally intended to provide a venue for research on (psycho)linguistically relevant machine learning work has only occasionally provided a forum for work. Target Audience Our workshop aims to bring together researchers from the diverse fields of NLP, machine learning, artificial intelligence, (psycho)linguistics, etc. who are interested in the relevance of computational techniques for understanding human language learning. The workshop is intended to bridge the gap between the computational and cognitive communities, promote knowledge and resource sharing, and help initiate interdiciplinary research projects. Areas of Interest Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics: * Computational learning theory and analysis of language learning * Computational models of human (first, second and bilingual) language acquisition * Computational models of various components of the language faculty and their impact on the acquisition task * Computational models of the evolution of language * Data resources and tools for investigating computational models of human language acquisition * Empirical and theoretical comparisons of the learning environment and its impact on the acquisition task * 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 the cognitive aspect Papers can cover one or more of these areas. Submission Information Papers should describe original work and should indicate the state of completion of the reported results. In particular, any overlap with previously published work should be clearly mentioned. Submissions will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength, clarity of presentation, usability, and significance/relevance to the workshop. Submissions should follow the two-column format of the ACL 2007 main-conference proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of either the LaTeX style file or the Microsoft-Word Style file, which can be found at http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles. The reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self- citations and other references that could reveal the author's identity should be avoided. Submission will be electronic. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. Papers must be submitted no later than March 26, 2007 using the submission webpage http://www.softconf.com/acl07/ACL07-WS15/submit.html. Submissions will be reviewed by 3 members of the Program Committee. Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to produce camera-ready versions of their papers for inclusion in the ACL workshop proceedings. Notification of receipt will be emailed to the contact author. Important Dates Paper submission deadline: 26 March 2007 Acceptance notification sent: 20 April 2007 Final version deadline: 9 May 2007 Workshop date: 29 June 2007 Workshop Chairs Paula Buttery University of Cambridge, UK Aline Villavicencio Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil Anna Korhonen University of Cambridge, UK Address any queries regarding the workshop to: cognitive-2007@cl.cam.ac.uk Program Committee Colin J Bannard (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany) Robert C. Berwick (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) Chris Brew (Ohio State University, USA) Ted Briscoe (University of Cambridge, UK) Robin Clark (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Stephen Clark (University of Oxford, UK) Alexander Clark (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) Matthew W. Crocker (Saarland University, Germany) James Cussens (University of York, UK) Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, Belgium and Tilburg University, The Netherlands) Bruno Gaume (Universite Paul Sabatier, France) Ted Gibson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) Julia Hockenmaier (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Marco Idiart (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) Mark Johnson (Brown University, USA) Aravind Joshi (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Gerard Kempen (Leiden University, Netherlands) Brian MacWhinney (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Martin Pickering (University of Glasgow, UK) Thierry Poibeau (University Paris 13, France) Ari Rappoport (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) Kenji Sagae (University of Tokyo, Japan) Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart, Germany) Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh, UK) Suzanne Stevenson (University of Toronto, Canada) Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Menno van Zaanen (Macquarie University, Australia)