SMART Cognitive Science Lectures

• Please refer to the official SMART Cognitive Science website

• 14 December 2011
  Speaker: William Bechtel (Philosophy Department, UCSD)
  Title: Deciphering the Neural Code: A Critical Role for Representations in Understanding Cognitive Mechanisms
  Date and time: Wednesday 14 December 2011, 16:00
  Location: Room 3.01, Universiteitstheater, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16-18, Amsterdam

Computational Linguistics Seminar

Also check the archive of messages posted at our mailing list

• Thursday 22/9 at 4pm in room *A1.10*
  Fermin Moscoso del Prado Martin (CNRS/Rhône-Alpin, France) on:
  
  "Information theoretical approaches to language structure and complexity"
  
  
  (organized by Rens). More information on Fermin's research generally can be found at his website: http://www.moscosodelprado.net/
  
  
  
• Wednesday 28/9/2011, 4pm, in room A1.04,
  Andreas van Cranenburgh (MoL) on:
  
  Discontinuous Data-Oriented Parsing: A mildly context-sensitive all-fragments grammar
  
  
  Recent advances in parsing technology have made treebank parsing with discontinuous constituents possible, with parser output of competitive quality (Kallmeyer and Maier, 2010). We apply Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) to a grammar formalism that allows for discontinuous trees (LCFRS). Decisions during parsing are conditioned on all possible fragments, resulting in improved performance. Despite the fact that both DOP and discontinuity present formidable challenges in terms of computational complexity, the model is reasonably efficient, and surpasses the state of the art in discontinuous parsing (based on a joint paper with Remko Scha and Federico Sangati).
  
  
  
• Wednesday Sept 14th, 3pm, Beta Lounge (B1.25),
  Shalom Lappin (King's College London) and Jan van Eijck (CWI) will talk on
  
  "Probabilistic Semantics for Natural Language" (joint session with the DIP-seminar)
  
  
  Probabilistic and stochastic methods have been fruitfully applied to a wide variety of problems in grammar induction, natural language processing, and cognitive modeling. In this talk I will explore the possibility of developing a class of combinatorial semantic representations for natural languages that compute the semantic value of a (declarative) sentence as a probability value which expresses the likelihood of speakers of the language accepting the sentence as true in a given model. Such an approach to semantic representation treats the pervasive gradience of semantic properties as intrinsic to speakers' linguistic knowledge, rather the result of the interference of performance factors in processing and interpretation. In order for this research program to succeed, it must solve three central problems. First, it needs to formulate a type system that computes the probability value of a sentence from the semantic values of its syntactic constituents. Second, it must incorporate a viable probabilitic logic into the representation of semantic knowledge in order to model meaning entailment. Finally, it must show how the specified class of semantic representations can be efficiently learned from the primary linguistic data available for language acquisition. This research has developed out of recent work with Alex Clark (Royal Holloway, London) on the application of computational learning theory to grammar induction.

  Download the slides here



• Thursday Sept 1st, 3pm, D1.113, Suzanne Stevenson (Department of Computer Science, Toronto) will give a talk on
  
  "Computational Models of Child Verb Learning: Mechanisms for abstraction and generalization"
  
  
  Early verb learning in children seems an almost miraculous feat. In learning a verb, children must learn both the basic meaning of the event ("falling" or "eating"), as well as the allowable structures in their language for correctly communicating the participants in that event ("The glass fell", but not "She fell the glass"). Moreover, given the sparsity of evidence, children must be able to abstract away from specific usages they observe in order to use their knowledge of verbs productively. Finally, children must accomplish all this in the face of a high degree of variability among verbs, along with much noise and uncertainty in the input data, and with no explicit teaching. Do children require innate knowledge of language to accomplish this, or are general cognitive learning mechanisms sufficient to the task? We have developed various computational models of verb learning using unsupervised clustering over simple statistical properties of verb usages. Our findings support the claim that general learning mechanisms are able to acquire abstract knowledge of verbs and to generalize that knowledge to novel verbs and situations.
  

  This is joint work with Paola Merlo, Afra Alishahi, and Chris Parisien.

• Meaning
• Language acquisition
• Statistical machine translation
• Incremental parsing
• Major syntactic formalisms
• Natural language learning

• Other Colloquia and Seminars at the ILLC.
• The Information and Language Processing Systems seminar at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam.
• The Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication seminar

• Format: talks by locals and outsiders, alternating with a reading group
• Time: nearly weekly, on Wednesday afternoon. Talks start at 16.00 and take about 1 hour + discussion. Reading groups start at 16.00 and last 1-2 hrs.
• Place: Science Park 904. Talks in one of the Building A lecture rooms. Reading groups in C3.108 (the ILLC meeting room ).
• Topic of the talks: Computational Linguistics -- that is, research that is or can be implemented in a computer program, and tries to process or account for natural language data. This includes language modeling, cognitive modeling, statistical modeling, pattern recognition and machine learning methods, formal linguistic grammars, speech recognition, machine translation, computational semantics, and other topics that one currently finds at ACL, COLING, the CL journal, and occasionally in journals such as Cognitive Science and Cognition.
• Audience: anyone who finds these topics interesting, in particular members of the Language & Computation group at the ILLC.

Last modified: Monday, 05-Dec-2011 17:47:14 CET