Natural language research announcements

[Rajhans Samdani <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Hi all,

Prof. Suzanne Stevenson (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~suzanne/) is giving this 
week's 
AIIS talk. Details below:

When: Wednesday, Aug 17, 4pm (*not* Fridat)

Where 3405 SC.

Title: Learning the meaning of words in context: A probabilistic 
computational model

Abstract:
An average five-year-old knows 10,000-15,000 words, most of which she has 
heard 
only in ambiguous contexts – that is, when she hears an utterance, the child 
must 
determine which of numerous possible concepts is being talked about, and must 
further figure out which word goes along with which of those meanings.  The 
open-
ended nature of the input to children has often been used as an argument for 
the 
necessity of innate, language-specific mechanisms that enable them to focus 
their 
learning appropriately.  More recently, however, a number of researchers have 
instead 
claimed that general cognitive abilities should be sufficient to the task of 
word 
learning.  We have developed a computational model that helps to shed light 
on this 
debate by demonstrating that word–meaning mappings can be acquired through a 
general probabilistic learning mechanism.  The model incrementally builds up 
(probabilistic) associations between words and meanings when exposed to 
naturalistic data of words in context, without the use of special biases or 
constraints.  
In this talk, I’ll describe the model along with some of its results on 
learning low 
frequency words, a particular challenge for children given the large number 
of such 
words and the sparsity of evidence about them.

This is joint work with Afsaneh Fazly, Afra Alishahi, Aida Nematzadeh, and 
Fatemeh 
Ahmadi-Fakhr.


Hoping to see you all!

Best,
Rajhans


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