Questions related to language acquisition have been of interest for many centuries, as children seem to acquire a sophisticated capacity for processing language with apparent ease, in the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. However, with recent advances in technology and cognitive-related research it is now possible to conduct large-scale computational investigations of these issues

The book discusses some of the latest theoretical and practical developments in the areas involved, including computational models for language tasks, tools and resources that help to approximate the linguistic environment available to children during acquisition, and discussions of challenging aspects of language that children have to master.

This is a much-needed collection that provides a cross-section of recent multidisciplinary research on the computational modeling of language acquisition. It is targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of computational techniques for understanding language acquisition. Readers of this book will be introduced to some of the latest approaches to these tasks including:

* Models of acquisition of various types of linguistic information (from words to syntax and semantics) and their relevance to research on human language acquisition

* Analysis of linguistic and contextual factors that influence acquisition

* Resources and tools for investigating these tasks

Each chapter is presented in a self-contained manner, providing a detailed description of the relevant aspects related to research on language acquisition, and includes illustrations and tables to complement these in-depth discussions. Though there are no formal prerequisites, some familiarity with the basic concepts of human and computational language acquisition is beneficial.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, PROPOR 2018, held in Canela, RS, Brazil, in September 2018. The 42 full papers, 3 short papers and 4 other papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: Corpus Linguistics, Information Extraction, LanguageApplications, Language Resources, Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining, Speech Processing, and Syntax and Parsing.

Questions related to language acquisition have been of interest for many centuries, as children seem to acquire a sophisticated capacity for processing language with apparent ease, in the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. However, with recent advances in technology and cognitive-related research it is now possible to conduct large-scale computational investigations of these issues The book discusses some of the latest theoretical and practical developments in the areas involved, including computational models for language tasks, tools and resources that help to approximate the linguistic environment available to children during acquisition, and discussions of challenging aspects of language that children have to master. This is a much-needed collection that provides a cross-section of recent multidisciplinary research on the computational modeling of language acquisition. It is targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of computational techniques for understanding language acquisition. Readers of this book will be introduced to some of the latest approaches to these tasks including: * Models of acquisition of various types of linguistic information (from words to syntax and semantics) and their relevance to research on human language acquisition * Analysis of linguistic and contextual factors that influence acquisition * Resources and tools for investigating these tasks Each chapter is presented in a self-contained manner, providing a detailed description of the relevant aspects related to research on language acquisition, and includes illustrations and tables to complement these in-depth discussions. Though there are no formal prerequisites, some familiarity with the basic concepts of human and computational language acquisition is beneficial.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, PROPOR 2012, held in Coimbra, Portugal in April 2012. The 24 revised full papers and 23 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 86 submissions. These papers cover the areas related to phonology, morphology and POS-Tagging, acquisition, language resources, linguistic description, syntax and parsing, semantics, opinion analysis, natural language processing applications, speech production and phonetics, speech resources, speech processing and applications.

How do infants learn a language? Why and how do languages evolve? How do we understand a sentence? This book explores these questions using recent computational models that shed new light on issues related to language and cognition. The chapters in this collection propose original analyses of specific problems and develop computational models that have been tested and evaluated on real data. Featuring contributions from a diverse group of experts, this interdisciplinary book bridges the gap between natural language processing and cognitive sciences. It is divided into three sections, focusing respectively on models of neural and cognitive processing, data driven methods, and social issues in language evolution. This book will be useful to any researcher and advanced student interested in the analysis of the links between the brain and the language faculty.