[Colloquium] Talk Tomorrow (Thursday 1/20 @ 2:00 pm)

[Katherine Cumming]

TOYOTA TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE TALK
 
Speaker: John Hale
Department of Linguistics & Languages and
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Michigan State University
 
Title: Probabilistic Parsing, Computational Work and Human Sentence
Processing
 
Speaker's homepage: http://www.msu.edu/~jthale/
 
 
Time: Thursday, January 20th, 2:00 pm
Place: TTI-C conference room (1427 E. 60th St. - 2nd Floor) refreshments
provided
 
Abstract: 
Abstract: Formal grammars, besides being useful in compilers for
programming languages,
can also serve as models of natural languages like English. Such
grammars encode
the knowledge people have about their languages. However, they leave
open the matter of
how this knowledge is actually used to read sentences.
 
Towards a completely explict account of our human sentence processing
abilities,
this talk presents a definition of the computational work performed in
the course
of parsing a grammatical sentence: the more informative a word is with
respect to
the syntactic structure of the sentence, the more work is involved
processing it.
Behind the definition is the intuition that comprehenders are searching,
on a potentially very ambiguous grammar, for the parse tree that the
speaker intended.
 
The tools of information theory are used to render this intuition
precise, and,
its predictions are examined on a range of well-documented sentence
processing phenomena.
 
 
 
 
If you have questions, or would like to meet the speaker, please contact
Katherine at 4-1994 or kcumming at tti-c.org
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20050119/199a35d3/attachment.htm