Distributional learning of syntax
| Dates: | 5 November 2013 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | Current University students, University staff |
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| Speaker: | Alexander Clark |
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LEL Research Seminar talk. Abstract: "Recently some new techniques of grammatical inference have been developed, inspired by some old ideas of distributional learning from structuralist linguistics. These models have now reached a level where the classes of grammars that they can learn are large enough to describe natural languages. This raises the interesting question as to whether they are plausible models of language acquisition, and if so what the consequences are for the standard models of mainstream generative grammar. In this talk, I will survey the current state of the art of this theory, and relate it to fundamental disputes about the nature of the language faculty."
Speaker
Alexander Clark
Organisation: King's College London
Biography: Alexander Clark is a Lecturer in Logic and Linguistics in the Department of Philosophy at King's College London; before that he taught for several years in the Computer Science department of Royal Holloway, University of London. His first degree was in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and his Ph.D. is from the University of Sussex. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Geneva. He is currently President of SIGNLL and chair of the steering committee of the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference. His research is on unsupervised learning in computational linguistics, grammatical inference, and theoretical and mathematical linguistics.
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A2.16
Ellen Wilkinson Building
Manchester
