Computational Linguistics Colloquium
Tuesday, 14 May 2013, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7.4
Note the unusual date!
Probability and a quantitative science of language
Roger LevyUCSD Computational Psycholinguistics Lab
Department of linguistics
University of California, San Diego
The quantitative study of grammar and the lexicon has long–standing roots dating back to Schuchardt and Zipf, but has not played a central role in the scientific study of language over the past sixty years. In recent years, however, contemporary ideas and tools drawn from computational linguistics, corpus analysis, and experimental psycholinguistics have made it possible to rejuvenate these ideas with a new level of theoretical and empirical depth and rigor. This quantitative science of language synthesizes probabilistic grammatical formalisms with notions of rational action and communicative efficiency, and has helped us make extensive recent inroads in the study of language comprehension and production. In this talk I give a broad overview of recent developments in this endeavor, including prediction, syntactic ambiguity resolution, and uncertain input representations in language comprehension, rational models of eye movement control in reading, phonetic and grammatical reduction in spontaneous speech, and the structuring of the lexicon itself for efficiency in linguistic communication.
This talk discusses both work done in the Computational Psycholinguistics Lab at UC San Diego and work done by colleagues at other institutions.
If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact
Matthew Crocker.