Language Acquisition in Humans and Computers

3rd yr/MSc seminar, School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, semester aleph, 2005-6

Time and place: Mondays, 2-4pm, Physics — Shenkar, rm.105
Instructor: Shimon Edelman (office hours by appointment via email, s e 3 7 @ c o r n e l l . e d u)

Read this first. Don't panic: this is a seminar in computer science, and no prior knowledge of psychology or linguistics is needed. Your openness to knowledge from cognitive psychology and linguistics will, however, be rewarded by a deeper understanding of how language can be processed — is processed, in fact, by the biological computer that is the human brain.

In this seminar, we shall survey a promising new approach to the understanding of the cognitive function that is at the core of the human nature: language. Thematically, the material to be covered focuses on two aspects of the study of language: (1) psycholinguistic data and their interpretation, and (2) algorithmic studies and computational modeling. In psycholinguistics, we shall read key papers that shed light on the nature of linguistic knowledge ("grammar") possessed by normal adult speakers, and on the acquisition of this knowledge by children. In computation, the focus is on acquisition of grammar from raw data. The common thread to all the works that we shall read is realism:

A somewhat more detailed description of the seminar can be found here.

There is also a bulletin board, where you can post messages and questions (including links and attachments), and set up an account to receive email notification about new postings.

Weekly reading list

Note: `*' marks a password-protected link; email me (s e 3 7 @ c o r n e l l . e d u) for the password.
week/datetopicsuggested readingsupplementary reading
week 1:
31 Oct.
Preliminaries:
  1. C. Phillips, *Syntax, Macmillan Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (2001).
  2. S. Edelman, Bridging language with the rest of cognition: computational, algorithmic and neurobiological issues and methods, Proc. Ithaca EMCL workshop (John Benjamins, 2005, in press).
week 2:
7 Nov.

[Assaf]
Computational aspects of grammar acquisition:
  1. P. Adriaans and M. van Zaanen, *Computational Grammar Induction for Linguists, Grammars 7:57-68 (2004).
  2. A. Roberts and E. Atwell, Unsupervised grammar inference systems for natural language, School of Computing, University of Leeds, TR 2002.20 (2002).
week 3:
14 Nov.

[Alona]
A quick introduction to psycholinguistics:
  1. M. Penke and A. Rosenbach, *What counts as evidence in linguistics? The case of innateness, Studies in Language 28:480-526 (2004).
  2. N. F. Johnson, The psychological reality of phrase-structure rules, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 4:469-475 (1965).
week 4:
21 Nov.

[no meeting]

The nature of the Primary Linguistic Data (PLD):
  1. G. K. Pullum and B. Scholz, *Empirical assessment of poverty of the stimulus arguments, The Linguistic Review 19:9-50 (2002).
  2. F. Reali and M. H. Christiansen, *Uncovering the richness of the stimulus: Structural dependence and indirect statistical evidence, Cognitive Science, in press (2005).
  • B. MacWhinney, Language Emergence, 17-42, in An integrated view of language development — Papers in honor of Henning Wode, P. Burmeister and T. Piske and A. Rohde, eds. (2002).
week 5:
28 Nov.

[Guy]
Evidence for item-based development:
  1. E. Bates and J. C. Goodman, *On the Emergence of Grammar From the Lexicon, 29-79, in Emergence of Language, B. MacWhinney, ed., Erlbaum (1999).
  2. M. Tomasello, *The item-based nature of children's early syntactic development, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4:156-163 (2000).
week 6:
5 Dec.

[Alexandra]
Evidence for imperfect adult performance:
  1. A. J. Sanford and P. Sturt, *Depth of processing in language comprehension: not noticing the evidence, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6:382-386 (2002).
  2. F. Ferreira, K. G. D. Bailey, and V. Ferraro, *Good-enough representations in language comprehension, Current Directions in Psychological Science 11:11-15 (2002).
week 7:
12 Dec.

[Amnon]
Evidence for imperfect adult "competence":
  1. N. Chipere, Real Language Users, CogPrints (1998).
  2. N. Chipere, *Native speaker variations in syntactic competence: implications for first language teaching, Language Awareness 10:107-124 (2001).
week 8:
19 Dec.

[Jonathan]
Evidence for continuity with the rest of cognition:
  1. C. L. Harris and E. Bates, *Clausal backgrounding and pronominal reference: A functionalist approach to c-command, Language and Cognitive Processes 17:237-270 (2002).
week 9:
26 Dec.

[Oren]
Evidence for the centrality of experience:
  1. C. L. Harris, Psycholinguistic studies of entrenchment, in Conceptual Structures, Language and Discourse, volume 2, J. Koenig, ed., CSLI (1998).
  2. J. Saffran, *Constraints on statistical language learning, Journal of Memory and Language 47:172-196 (2002).
week 10:
2 Jan.

[Nana]
Relying on experience:
  1. R. Scha, R. Bod, and K. Sima'an, A memory-based model of syntactic analysis: data-oriented parsing J. of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 11:409-440 (1999).
week 11:
9 Jan.

[Yasmine and Eitan]
Learning grammar:
  1. A. Clark, Unsupervised induction of stochastic context-free grammars using distributional clustering, Proc. CoNLL (2001).
  2. M. van Zaanen and P. Adriaans, Comparing two unsupervised grammar induction systems: alignment-based learning vs. EMILE, School of Computing, Leeds University TR 05 (2001).
week 12:
16 Jan.
[Daphna and Ephi]
Learning grammar:
  1. J. G. Wolff, Learning syntax and meanings through optimization and distributional analysis, 179-215, in Categories and Processes in Language Acquisition, Y. Levy, I. M. Schlesinger, and M. D. S. Braine, eds., Erlbaum (1988).
  2. P. Langley and S. Stromsten, Learning context-free grammars with a simplicity bias, 220-228, Proc. 11th European Conference on Machine Learning (2002).
week 13:
23 Jan.
[Zachi's talk]
Learning grammar: ADIOS
  1. Z. Solan, D. Horn, E. Ruppin, and S. Edelman, *Unsupervised learning of natural languages, in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (102:11629-11634, 2005).
  • Z. Solan, D. Horn, E. Ruppin, and S. Edelman, *supplementary material to Unsupervised learning of natural languages.
week 14:
30 Jan.
[Shimon]
Wrap-up:
  1. A. E. Goldberg, *Constructions: a new theoretical approach to language, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7:219-224 (2003).
  2. L. Cyrus, review of Construction Grammar in a Cross-Language Perspective, M. Fried and J.-O. Östman, John Benjamins (2004).
  • M. Hoey, Lexical priming and the properties of text, 385-412, in Corpora and discourse, A. Partington, J. Morley, and L. Haarman, eds., Peter Lang (2004).
  • V. Quochi, review of Construction Grammar in a Cross-Language Perspective, M. Fried and J.-O. Östman, John Benjamins (2004).
Google
Shimon Edelman <se37@cornell.edu>
Last modified on Mon Jan 9 06:38:17 2006