[Colloquium] Reminder: Komarova Talk Tomorrow @ 3:00pm TTI-C

[Katherine Cumming]

Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago Talk
 
Learning Theory Program
 
Speaker:  Natalia Komarova, Rutgers University & UCI
Speaker's homepage:  http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~komarova/
 
Time:  Wednesday, March 30th @ 3:00pm
Location:  TTI-C Conference Room 
 
Title: Evolution and Learning of Language
 
Abstract:
I will give an overview of the recent work that has been done in an
attempt to create a mathematical formulation of the evolution of
language. I will discuss the key notions of ``language'', ``grammar''
and ``learning'' and formulate the ``paradox of language acquisition''.
I will discuss some, more or less, relevant learning algorithms, and
present some interesting results on their convergence. Then I will go on
to introduce the notion of ``group learning'' as opposed to the
classical ``individual learning''. It turns out that methods of
evolutionary biology can be applied to describe the dynamics of
language. In a sense, languages evolve like organisms in a population:
the fittest ones survive and spread, the less fit ones get eliminated.
The two driving forces of evolution, selection and mutation (i.e. the
mistakes when learning a language), can be incorporated into a system of
ordinary differential equations describing the process of evolution. One
of the questions we can ask is how accurate children have to learn the
language of their parents in order for the population to be able to
maintain a coherent language? Another one is what are the evolutionary
forces that shape the Chomskian Universal Grammar? 
 
 
 
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