Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 5 December 2013, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7.4

Communicative Design in Human Language

I will present an overview of my research studying communicative properties of language. I will argue that specific features of human language--such as the variation in word lengths and the presence of ambiguity--can be understood as information-theoretically efficient solutions to communicative problems. I will also discuss recent experiments testing this general approach and present evidence that sentence processing mechanisms make rational communicative inferences in decoding language across a noisy channel. These projects suggest that the cognitive mechanisms supporting human language are well-structured for solving problems of communication.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Matthew Crocker.