CFP: Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics @ Sofia, Bulgaria

A workshop to be held August 8, 2013 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Sofia, Bulgaria. This workshop provides a venue for work in computational psycholinguistics. ACL Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Martin Kay described this topic as "build[ing] models of language that reflect in some interesting way on the ways in which people use language." The 2013 workshop follows in the tradition of several previous meetings

  the computational psycholinguistics meeting at CogSci in Berkeley in 1997
  the Incremental Parsing workshop at ACL 2004
  the first three CMCL workshops at ACL 2010, ACL 2011, and NAACL-HLT 2012

in inviting contributions that apply methods from computational linguistics to problems in the cognitive modeling of any and all natural language abilities.


KEYNOTE TALKS

CMCL 2013 will feature keynote talks by

* Sharon Goldwater, University of Edinburgh
* Rick Lewis, University of Michigan


SCOPE AND TOPICS

The workshop invites a broad spectrum of work in the cognitive science of language, at all levels of analysis from sounds to discourse. Topics include, but are not limited to

* incremental parsers for diverse grammar formalisms
* derivations of quantitative measures of comprehension difficulty, or predictions regarding generalization in language learning
* stochastic models of factors encouraging one production or interpretation over its competitors
* models of semantic/pragmatic interpretation, including psychologically realistic notions of word meaning, phrase meaning, composition, and pragmatic inference
* models and empirical analysis of the relationship between mechanistic psycholinguistic principles and pragmatic or semantic adaptation, usually in dialogue
* models of human language acquisition and/or adaptation in a changing linguistic environment
* models of linguistic information propagation and language change in communication networks

Submissions are especially welcomed that combine computational modeling work with empirical data (e.g., corpora or experiments) to test theoretical questions about the nature of human linguistic acquisition, comprehension, and/or production.

CFP: Production of Referring Expressions @ Berlin, Germany

31 July 2013, Berlin, Germany.
Website: http://pre2013.uvt.nl/ [coming soon]
This workshop is organized as part of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013), and is a follow-up to successful workshops on the production of referring expressions in Amsterdam (http://pre2009.uvt.nl) and Boston (http://pre2011.uvt.nl).

Invited speakers:

- Herb Clark (Stanford)
- Noah Goodman (Stanford)

Topics:

We invite submissions on all topics related to reference production, and particularly encourage work that combines experimental, computational and theoretical approaches. Specific topics include, but are not limited to:

- collaborative reference, referring expressions in interactive settings, audience/recipient design
- non-determinism in reference production: how to algorithmically model non-determinism and individual variation in human reference production?
- interaction between comprehension and production of referring expressions
- visual scene perception and its influence on the production of referring expressions
- psychologically plausible computational models of reference production
- when and how do human speakers produce complex descriptions (e.g., plurals, quantified descriptions, relational descriptions)?
- vagueness: the use of vague (e.g. gradable) predicates in referring expressions
- referential over- and underspecification: why and how do speakers produce over- or underspecified descriptions?
- common ground, cooperativeness and shared/private information in reference
- realization of referring expressions (including speech and gesture)
- how do social and contextual factors influence reference production
- data-collection and experimental evaluation method

SALSA XXI Conference

The SALSA XXI Conference themed Language Variation and Change will be held at UT Austin this weekend (April 12-13). I will be giving a talk titled "Perception of Speaker Dialect and Sociolinguistic Variation: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials." Here is the abstract:

The present study recorded participants’ event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate how and when information indexed by sociolinguistic variation is integrated during real-time language processing. In this talk, I present the results of two ERP studies examining the perception of speech that varies by speaker dialect (Californian vs. Southern American English) and sociolinguistic variant (ING, with its canonical velar and vernacular alveolar pronunciations – working vs. workin’).

CFP: Linguistic Variability and How the Mind/Brain Accommodates It @ Ann Arbor, MI

Date: 14-Jul-2013 - 14-Jul-2013
Web Site: http://www.hlp.rochester.edu/variability/
Call Deadline: 01-May-2013

Linguistic communication requires that interlocutors understand each other's utterances. A fundamental challenge to this process arises because of variability: No two tokens of a given linguistic expression are ever the same. Speakers from different demographic categories or linguistic backgrounds will produce a given expression differently. Even within a speaker, variability arises when speakers use different registers, or simply because formulation and articulation are not rigid deterministic processes. This variability raises questions for linguistic and psycholinguistic theory, and poses a formidable challenge to work in natural automatic speech recognition as well as language processing.

For more details, please see http://www.hlp.rochester.edu/variability/.

Confirmed Invited Speakers:

Molly Babel, University of British Columbia
Sheila Blumstein, Brown University
Ann Bradlow, Northwestern University
Joan Bresnan, Stanford University
Gary Dell, University of Illinois

CFP: Variation and Contact in Languaging: Ecological and Complex Approaches @ Barcelona, Spain

Date: 19-Sep-2013 - 19-Sep-2013
Web Site: http://www.sociocomplexitat.ub.edu/VCL13
Call Deadline: 30-Jun-2013

Variation and Contact in Languaging: Ecological and Complex Approaches is a Satellite Workshop of the European Conference on Complex Systems ECCS 2013 hosted in Barcelona. It will be a half day workshop, on September 19. There will be invited talks and contributed talks.

The aim is sharing new mutual contributions in the field of socio/linguistics and establish an in-depth dialogue about the opportunities and limits of the links between sociological and philosophical propositions and mathematics, computer science and the modelling in terms of the complexity of language variation, change, contact, and evolution. In short, the goal is to find out what linguists can tell computational modellers and vice versa.

CFP: New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 42

October 17-20, 2013
Hosted by:
University of Pittsburgh
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA


http://www.linguistics.pitt.edu/nwav42
Pittsburghers like to boast that our city has more bridges than any other city in the world. In addition to bridging rivers, runs, highways, and hollows, Pittsburgh also bridges the past and the present, from the industrial expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the economic collapse thirty years ago, and finally to a mostly successful transition to industries of education, health care, and high technology.

CFP: PARLAY Conference @ York

Friday 6th September 2013
The University of York, Berrick Saul Building

In the University of York’s 50th anniversary year, we are pleased to announce the first Postgraduate and Academic Researchers in Linguistics at York (PARLAY) conference, supported by the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. This one-day conference is designed to give linguistics postgraduates from all research areas an opportunity to present and discuss their research in a friendly and intellectually stimulating setting at the University of York, with an opportunity for presenters to publish in a special edition of York’s own linguistics journal, the York Papers in Linguistics.

The conference will be held on Friday 6th September 2013 in the Berrick Saul Building, centrally situated overlooking the campus lake, which acts as a vibrant hub of research for postgraduates in the arts and humanities. A locally-sourced lunch will be provided, along with refreshments throughout the day. A conference dinner will be held in York in the evening, to which all delegates are invited.
We invite postgraduates, doctoral students and early career researchers to submit abstracts for oral and poster presentations on any language, across a range of topics in language and linguistics. This may include, but is not restricted to:

-Applied Linguistics
-Conversation Analysis
-Corpus Linguistics
-Discourse Analysis
-Historical Linguistics
-Language Acquisition
-Morphology
-Phonetics
-Phonology
-Pragmatics
-Psycholinguistics
-Semantics
-Sociolinguistics
-Syntax