Exemplar-Based Models of Language Acquisition and Use
A Workshop at ESSLLI 2007
19th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 6-17 August, 2007
Rens Bod and Dave Cochran
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Exemplar-based models conceive of linguistic representations as being directly shaped by speakers' memories of specific tokens of linguistic items. Such models are being considered by a growing number of researchers in virtually all areas of linguistics, from phonology (Pierrehumbert 2001; Bybee 2003), language acquisition (Tomasello 2000) and psycholinguistics (Baayen 2003) to computational linguistics and statistical natural language processing (Bod 2001; Manning 2003). Shared strengths of such models lie in their ability to model gradient and highly variable phenomena, and in their readiness to utilize data-rich resources, such as large and/or detailed corpus-based databases. Shared challenges lie in the need to account for speakers' ability to generalize, i.e. to learn and apply abstract patterns - those facts that inspired the notion of "infinite generative capacity". This workshop aims at bringing together linguists working to expand their exemplar-based models by computational modeling, and computational linguists/computer scientists interested in extending exemplar-based models beyond technological considerations to its potential for modeling the reality of human cognition of language.
We aim at one invited speaker of international standing in this area, and invite submissions from both PhD students and more senior researchers working in the cross-disciplinary area of exemplar-based linguistics and statistical natural language processing.
ESSLLI is the annual summer school of FoLLI, the European Association for Logic, Language and Information. ESSLLI 2007 is organised by the Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, under the auspices of FoLLI.
Instructions for Authors
Click here for instructions for authors.
Call For Papers
Submissions are now closed, and the review process is underway. If you want to see the CfP anyway, click for PDF, HTML or plain text.
Guest Speaker
Morten Christiansen will be giving an invited talk. Morten is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, Cornell University and director of the Cognitive Science Lab, and his interests include the statistical learning of complex sequential structure, crossmodal learning and language acquisition and processing.
The Workshop Organisers
Rens Bod is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the School of Computer Science and director of the Cognitive Systems Group at the University of St. Andrews; he is best known for his pioneering research into Data-Oriented Parsing and its applications to language, music and reasoning.
Dave Cochran is a PhD student in the Cognitive Systems Group and the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews, supervised by Rens Bod; he is interested in developing Data-Oriented models of first language acquisition and language processing; and in the philosophy of cognitive modelling.
References