Language, Cognition and Computational Models

Paris, May 28-29, 2013 – ENS & ISC-PIF

Organization

• Thierry Poibeau, laboratoire Lattice (« Langues, Textes, Traitements informatiques et Cognition », UMR8094, CNRS, École Normale Supérieure & Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, France)
• Aline Villavicencio, Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

The goal of this event is to provide a venue for the multidisciplinary discussion of theoretical and practical research for computational models of language and cognition. The event centers around recent advances on computational models for language acquisition, processing and evolution.

The first day will mainly address language evolution and some of the computational models that have been proposed to investigate possible avenues for this phenomenon. The second day will address more varied issues, ranging from the origins of language to recent trends in machine translation. All talks will address key questions dealing with cognitive, formal and/or computational issues related to language evolution and/or language processing.

Programme

Tuesday May 28th

• 09:00 - 09:15 - Opening - ENS - salle Dussane

• 09:15 - 12:45 - Multidisciplinary Aspects of Language Evolution

• 09:15 - 10:15 - Dan Dediu (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands) : The interplay between linguistic and biological evolution

• 10:15 - 11:15 - Ted Briscoe (University of Cambridge, UK) : A model of L1/L2 Language Acquisition and its implications for language change

• 11:15 - 11:45 - Break

• 11:45 - 12:45 - Anne Reboul (L2C2-CNRS, France) : Social Evolution of public languages : between Rousseau’s Eden and Hobbes’ Leviathan

• 12:45 - 14:30 - Lunch Break

• 14:30 - 17:00 - Modeling Language Evolution : Two Case Studies - ISC-PIF

• 14:30 - 15:30 - Benjamin Fagard (Lattice-CNRS, France) : Case, Prepositions and In‐Betweens : Sketching a Model of Grammatical Evolution

• 15:30 - 16:30 - Remi van Trijp (Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, France) : Linguistic Assessment Criteria for Explaining Language Change : A Case Study on Syncretism in German Definite Articles

• 16:30 - 17:00 - Discussions

Wednesday May 29th

• 09:00 - 11:00 - Cognitive and Computational Approaches to Language Processing - ENS - salle Dussane

• 09:00 - 10:00 - Robert Berwick (MIT, USA) : Darwinian Linguistics

• 10:00 - 11:00 - Massimo Poesio (University of Trento, Italy and University of Essex, UK) : Using Data about Conceptual Representations in the Brain for Computational Linguistics

• 11:00 - 11:30 - Break

• 11:30 - 12:30 - Philippe Blache (LPL, CNRS, France) : Measuring difficulty as well as facilitation : a new perspective for human language processing

• 12:30 - 14:30 - Lunch Break

• 14:30 - 16:30 - From Language Variety to Machine Tanslation - ENS - salle Dussane

• 14:30 - 15:30 - Shuly Wintner (University of Haifa, Israel) : The Features of Translationese

• 15:30 - 16:30 - Martin Kay (Stanford University, USA) : Putting Linguistics back into Computational Linguistics

• 16:30 - 17:00 - Discussions and Closing