[alife] Tutorial on modelling language origins and evolution

[Paul Vogt]

Apologies for multiple postings
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Call for participation:

Tutorial on modelling language origins and evolution

5 September 2005

Part of the European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2005, Kent,
England. http://www.ecal2005.org

Presenters: Bart de Boer, Paul Vogt and Tony Belpaeme

Evolutionary Linguistics is a new and rapidly growing field that has emerged
from the field of artificial life and that is concerned with modelling the
origins and evolution of language. It addresses questions such as the
evolution of speech, the origins of symbolic categories, grounding, the
origins of grammar, the prerequisites for human language, and origins of
symbolic communication. Although computational modelling research has
yielded interesting results, these are often misinterpreted or overlooked by
non-technically schooled researchers in the field. We feel this is partly
due to the way the complex and abstract models are presented. Scientists
lacking experience in computational modelling often find it difficult to
understand the underlying models and their results.

This tutorial offers an introduction for artificial life researchers who are
new to evolutionary linguistics and is aimed at understanding the field and
helping them set up computational experiments that address open issues. We
do this by presenting a thorough overview of the field and by discussing how
established ALife and AI techniques can be used to investigate the evolution
of language. To illustrate this we present a number of case studies. In
addition, we aim to provide suggestions of how to disseminate the research
to a multidisciplinary audience, which often include linguists,
anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists and biologists.

Topics include:

- Introduction into the field of language evolution.
- Major research questions in the field of language evolution.
- Computational modelling of language evolution
        - What computer models can contribute to the understanding of the
          evolution of language?
        - How to set up a computational model to study language evolution?
        - What techniques to use for which problems?
        - What research topics are suitable for modelling?
- Case studies plus demonstrations.
- Disseminating modelling results to non-technical researchers.
- Possible applications.
- Some caveats on modelling and presenting results.


Objectives and target audience:

We aim our tutorial primarily at young researchers and PhD students in
ALife who wish to start (or just have started) researching the rapidly
growing field of language evolution and computation. In addition, the
tutorial is interesting to those researchers who have an interest in the
field of evolutionary linguistics. This tutorial will be specifically
tailored
for ALife researchers, a community we have not yet been able to reach on the
previous two occasions where the tutorial was given. To accommodate our
audience, the tutorial will contain a specially tailored introduction to
language evolution for ALife researchers.

At the end of the day, we hope the participants

- have an insight in the field of evolutionary linguistics, especially with
respect to the questions that are posed within the field.
- have become acquainted with the topics that have been studied within this
field together with an overview of the most prominent open questions, thus
allowing them to initiate their own research
- understand why researchers outside the ALife community have problems
understanding computer models, so that the participant would be able to
disseminate his/her results to a wider audience.

To allow each of the groups to follow the course, no other prerequisites are
required than a basic academic knowledge of AI.

For more information consult
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv/tutorial-ecal05.html, or contact Paul Vogt:
paulv ' at 'ling.ed.ac.uk.