[Colloquium] REMINDER: TTIC Colloquium, 7/20: Paul Smolensky, John Hopkins University

[Mary Marre]

When:     Monday, July 20th at 11:00 a.m.

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:       Paul Smolensky; Johns Hopkins University

Title: What can vectorial representations do? Distributed structure
processing in neural networks


Abstract:
I will present a computational framework designed to enable unification of
four sources of power for computational semantics:

1. statistical distributional computation
2. parallel distributed neural network (NN) computation & learning
3. linguistic theory
4. symbolic structural computation

Exploiting the power of linguistic semantic theory (3) requires computation
over combinatorial symbol structures (4); the proposed framework makes this
possible within a neural network architecture (2) that can provide enhanced
power relative to purely symbolic computation — power that in principle
includes (1), to be addressed in future work.

A central idea of the architecture is that of a distributed structural role
vector, which enables encoding, in a nonlocal fashion, the positions of
constituents within a compositional structure. This yields automatic
similarity-based generalization across compositionally-related structural
positions or roles; e.g., the direct-object role vector of each active
transitive verb automatically incorporates a common dimension of
similarity: the assignment of properties such as ‘affected’ to arguments
filling that role.

Time permitting, I will present formal results on what functions can be
computed over these distributed representations of combinatorial structure,
and how grammatically-determined distributed structural representations can
be built using parallel neural network computation. It is my hope that the
talk and subsequent discussion can afford an opportunity to explore how
distributional semantics applications might incorporate (and thereby test)
aspects of the purely theoretical work that has been carried out to date.

*Host:* Kevin Gimpel


Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 504*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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