[Colloquium] Computer Science Talk

[Donna Brooms]

The Computer Science Department

Thursday, April 3, 2014
3:00 p.m.
Ryerson 251
 
Alexander Clark
King’s College London
www.kcl.ac.uk
 
Title: “Distributional Learning of context-free grammars”
 
Abstract: Rapid progress has been made in the last few years in the 'unsupervised' learning of context-free grammars from strings using distributional techniques: a core challenge for theoretical linguistics and natural language processing.  These techniques now allow the learning of large classes of context-free grammars under a variety of different learning models: exact query learning, probabilistic and identification in the limit.
 
All of these techniques are based directly or indirectly on an algebraic structure canonically associated with every formal language, called the syntactic concept lattice.
 
We will show that the minimal grammar for every context-free language has nonterminals drawn from this structure; and give examples of a number of algorithms that can learn large subclasses of CFLs, as well as examples of some simple CFLs that cannot be learned by any of these techniques.
 
 
Hosts: Prof. John Goldsmith
 
*Refreshments will be served prior to the talk at 2:30 in Ryerson 255*
 
 
 

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