Thematic Session on Computational Psycholinguistics

Chair:

Philip Resnik
resnik@umiacs.umd.edu

Session Description:

This thematic session will include empirical and theoretical studies on psychologically motivated computational models of human language. Giving this area a forum at ACL provides an opportunity to focus on theoretical and empirical investigations in computational linguistics from a cognitive perspective, at a time when the ACL is more and more dominated by work on natural language processing applications. Moreover, computational psycholinguistics has a deep concern with the empirical basis of research on language, a surprising commonality with the probabilistic approaches that are so emphasized of late. Including a focused session in this area at the conference offers the opportunity to build bridges between two areas that are both concerned with non-introspective data, statistical methods, and the relationship between linguistic competence and performance.

We solicit psychologically relevant work in computational linguistics, emphasizing the of computational modeling of human processes as opposed to NL applications. Areas of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • phonological or morphological processing
  • lexical access
  • syntactic parsing
  • semantic and pragmatic interpretation, text understanding
  • generation
  • disambiguation
  • acquisition of phonology, morphology, or grammar
  • acquisition of syntax and semantics

As noted above, we hope the session will provide an opportunity for dialogue that bridges the gap between applied probabilistic methods and cognitively relevant probabilistic models; however, we encourage high quality submissions in any area of computational psycholinguistics.

Submissions

Submissions should be sent directly to the ACL Program Committee chairs as with regular main session submissions by the January 25 deadline. Information can be found at the ACL '99 web site. Submissions should be marked for inclusion in this thematic session. We look forward to reviewing your submissions. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Review Committee:

  • Steve Abney (AT&T Research)
  • Michael Brent (Johns Hopkins)
  • Stephen Crain (Maryland)
  • Walter Daelemans (Tilburgh)
  • Jeff Elman (UCSD)
  • Bob Frank (Johns Hopkins)
  • Ted Gibson (MIT)
  • Jamie Henderson (Exeter)
  • Julia Hirchberg (AT&T Bell Labs)
  • Mark Johnson (Brown)
  • Dan Jurafsky (Colorado)
  • Dekang Lin (Manitoba)
  • Paola Merlo (Geneva)
  • David Poeppel (Maryland)
  • Terry Regier (Chicago)
  • Michael Spivey (Cornell)
  • Edward Stabler (UCLA)
  • Mark Steedman (Edinburgh)
  • Suzanne Stevenson (Rutgers)
  • Amy Weinberg (Maryland)