International Summer Atelier:
Modeling Language Evolution with Computational Construction Grammar

Atelier Director: Luc Steels
Ettore Majorana Foundation and Center For Scientific Culture
Erice (Sicily, Italy), 14-19 July 2007
Satellite-atelier of Statistical Physics of Social Dynamics and Language
The Atelier will contain a tutorial preparation, lectures, poster sessions and master classes:

1. Tutorial preparation


The school starts with tutorial preparations on Saturday July 14 and Sunday morning July 15. The tutorials include:

2. Lectures


Sunday late afternoon, the first lectures of the broader Summer School start. In addition to lectures on opinion dynamics and semiotic dynamics, the school contains a large number of lectures on language dynamics, typology, construction grammar, emergent human communication, child language and grammaticalisation (click here). Participants can follow all the lectures in all themes of the Summer School.

3. Master Classes and Atelier


Monday through Wednesday afternoon master classes go deeper into specific issues. Each time one of the lecturers of the school presents the viewpoint from the cognitive sciences (psychology and linguistics) followed by explanations and exercises how these ideas can be transformed into operational agent-based systems.

Master class topics:

There is ample time for computational experiments and participants are expected to carry out a small project.

4. Participant Presentations


Participants have two opportunities to present their own work: there is a poster session foreseen in the main school which will be attended by everybody and there are presentations of projects on Thursday afternoon July 19.

Staff of the atelier includes: Benjamin Bergen, Joris Bleys, Joachim De Beule, Laura Michaelis, Martin Loetzsch, Michael Spranger, Luc Steels, Wouter Van den Broeck, Remi van Trijp, and Pieter Wellens.