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Call for Papers
The journal Research on Language and Computation invites submission of papers for a special issue on Computational Models of Language Acquisition. Computational Models of First Language Acquisition Special Issue of Research on Language and Computation Editors
Important dates Submission of full papers: October 30, 2009 Notifications of decision: January 31, 2010 Revised versions due: April 1, 2010 Second review: June 1 2010 Final versions: August 1 2010 Publication: Late 2010 Background Language acquisition has for a long time stood as one of the most fundamental, beguiling, and surprisingly open questions of modern science. Recent advances in natural language processing, statistical parsing and machine learning, together with the availability of large corpora of child directed speech and other corpora, make a wide range of computationally-oriented approaches to the study of this problem available. In this special issue, we will provide a forum for the full range of current approaches to this important field. 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, through simulation, mathematically, the statistical analysis of corpora, etc., 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 We aim to publish papers that describe state of the art techniques in computational models of language acquisition. These should be computationally explicit but not necessarily implemented and these could be evaluated empirically, theoretically or on the basis of a detailed case study. This special issue should provide an interdisciplinary forum where researchers in theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, natural language processing, grammatical inference, machine learning and cognitive science can present research on the computational modelling of first language acquisition. We welcome papers from any of the current models of linguistic theorising: standard and enriched context free models, Principles and Parameters models, Optimiality theory and reseachers working within the Minimalist Program, and other approaches. Topics include but are not limited to
Instructions Submissions should be made online using Springer's Editorial Manager System, available at Length
Further information Please contact Alexander Clark (alexc @ cs.rhul.ac.uk) for any further questions |
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