Natural language research announcements

[Rajhans Samdani <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Hi all,

The talk by Yang Wang is postponed to next Friday (24th Sept.) This week we 
don't 
have any AIIS talk; instead the following talk -- on Friday, 1.30 pm -- can 
be of interest 
to several of you. 


SLATE Lecture Series: Prof. Elissa Newport (Co-sponsored with CS/AI at 
Beckman) 
          
         Speaker                 Professor Elissa Newport, Department of 
Brain & Cognitive 
Sciences, University of Rochester
                          
         Date            Sep 17, 2010
                          
         Time            1:30 pm  
                          
         Location                5602 Beckman Institute
                          
         Sponsor                 SLATE, CS/AI group at Beckman
                          
         Original Calendar              SLATE Events
                          
         Views           298
                          
 

 
Title:
Statistical language learning: Computational and maturational constraints
 
Abstract
In recent years a number of problems in the brain and cognitive
sciences have been addressed through statistical approaches,
hypothesizing that humans and animals learn or adapt to their
perceptual environments by tuning themselves to the statistics of
incoming stimulation.  Professor Newport will present her work on
statistical language learning, showing that infants, young children,
and adults can compute, online and with remarkable speed, how
consistently sounds co-occur, how frequently words occur in similar
contexts, and the like, and can utilize these statistics to find
candidate words in a speech stream, discover grammatical categories,
and acquire simple syntactic structure in miniature languages.  Her
recent research has also shown that there are maturational changes in 
statistical 
learning, with children sharpening the statistics and
producing a more systematic language than the one to which they are
exposed.  These sharpening processes potentially explain why children
acquire language (and other patterns) more effectively than adults,
and also how systematic languages may emerge in communities where
usages are varied and inconsistent.


Rajhans Samdani,
Graduate Student,
Dept. of Computer Science,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.