Computational Modeling of Human Language Acquisition

Afra Alishahi is a Research Fellow at the Computational Psycholinguistics group in the Computational Linguistics and Phonetics Department at Saarland University, Germany. She received her PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science at University of Toronto in 2008, where she was a member of the Computational Linguistics group. Her research has been focused on developing computational models of various aspects of first language acquisition, including learning the meaning of words, the formation of lexical categories and the acquisition of verb argument structure. She was the runner-up for Marr prize for the best student paper at the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2005), and the winner of the Cognitive Science Prize for the best paper on Language Modeling at the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2008). She has offered several courses on the topics covered in this book, including graduate-level lectures and seminars atSaarland University, a tutorial at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2009) and an advanced course at the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2010).

• Overview.- Computational Models of Language Learning.- Learning Words.- Putting Words Together.- Form--Meaning Associations.- Final Thoughts.