[CL+NLP Lunch] CL+NLP Lunch: Brian MacWhinney (11/3)

[Nathan Schneider]

Dear all,

Brian MacWhinney will speak about models of language learning next Wednesday
for the second meeting of LTI's seminar on Computational Linguistics and
Natural Language Processing. Details about the talk are below.

Cheers,
Nathan & Ben

--

CL+NLP Lunch*
Wednesday, November 3
NSH 3305*
Food will be served at 11:45; the talk will begin promptly at noon.

*Brian MacWhinney*
Professor, CMU Psychology Department

*Item-based patterns, computation, and the brain*

*Abstract:*
Young children build up sentences by combining words into clusters.
Unification grammars such as HPSG, LFG, or Minimalism recognize the
importance of such clusters, but rely on combinations of part of speech
categories whose development is never explained.  The alternative approach
to clustering that I have developed emphasizes the role of item-based
patterns in early acquisition.  These patterns are initially specific to
individual lexical operators such as “more”, “my” or “want”.  Children then
induce higher-level feature-based patterns through feature pruning, much as
in the theory of Hierarchical Bayesian Models.  A left-associative processor
can use patterns on these various levels to generate the required sentence
patterns of the target language.

In this talk, I will:

1. review developmental evidence for the shift from item-based to
feature-based patterns;

2. explain how this shift provides a solution to the Logical Problem of
Language Acquisition;

3. examine recent work in computational modeling of language learning and
show why it needs to pay more attention to the shift from item-based to
feature-based patterns; and

4. link the theory of item-based patterns to core facts about language
processing in the brain.

*Bio:*
Brian MacWhinney is Professor of Psychology, Computational Linguistics, and
Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University.  He has developed a model of
first and second language processing and acquisition based on competition
between item-based patterns. Data for these models come from the CHILDES
(Child Language Data Exchange System) database, which he has developed. He
is now extending this spoken language database system to six additional
research areas in the form of the TalkBank Project. MacWhinney’s recent work
includes studies of online learning of second language vocabulary and
grammar, neural network modeling of lexical development, fMRI studies of
children with focal brain lesions, and ERP studies of between-language
competition. He is also exploring the role of grammatical constructions in
the marking of perspective shifting and the construction of mental models in
scientific reasoning.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nlp-lunch/ <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Enlp-lunch/>
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