Archives

Please note that this newsitem has been archived, and may contain outdated information or links.

12 October 2007, Workshop on "Learning Syntactic Structure"

Date: Friday 12 October 2007
Location: P3.27, Euclides Building, Plantage Muidergracht 24, Amsterdam

On Friday, October 12th 2007, on the occasion of Yoav Seginer's PhD-defense, there will be workshop on "Learning Syntactic Structure"

10.00, Agnietenkapel, PhD defense Yoav Seginer
13.30, P3.27, lunch
14.00, P3.27, Alexander Clark, What makes languages learnable?
15.00-17.00, P3.27, discussion sessions (including coffee breaks)


What makes languages learnable?
Alexander Clark (Royal Holloway University of London)

In spite of the empirical successes in unsupervised learning of natural language, by Klein and Manning, Bod, Seginer etc, there is still little theoretical understanding of why these approaches work, or what classes of languages they work on. In this talk I will discuss some theoretical work on the learnability of languages that may shed some light on what the limitations of current techniques are and how they might be overcome. In particular I will discuss approaches based on distributional learning, and the class of non-terminally separated (NTS) languages.


Discussion sessions

(i) theoretical vs. empirical approaches, introduced by Pieter Adriaans
(ii) grammar induction & language acquisition, introduced by Remko Scha
(iii) grammar vs. parser induction, introduced by Yoav Seginer

Discussants: Rens Bod, Khalil Sima'an, Jelle Zuidema and others (t.b.a.)

Please note that this newsitem has been archived, and may contain outdated information or links.