New article on Unified Model of Linguistic and Musical Processing

[Rens Bod]

Dear Connectionists,

The following paper may of interest to the readers of this list.

Best,
   Rens Bod
  (http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~rens)

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Bod, Rens (2002)
  "A Unified Model of Structural Organization in Language and Music",
   Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
   Volume 17, pages 289-308.

   Available at http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~rens/jair02.pdf
   (or also via http://www.jair.org/abstracts/bod02a.html)

   Abstract: Is there a general model that can predict the perceived
   phrase structure in language and music? While it is usually assumed
   that humans have separate faculties for language and music, this work
   focuses on the commonalities rather than on the differences between
   these modalities, aiming at finding a deeper 'faculty'. Our key idea
   is that the perceptual system strives for the simplest structure (the
   'simplicity principle'), but in doing so it is biased by the
   likelihood of previous structures (the 'likelihood principle'). We
   present a series of data-oriented parsing (DOP) models that combine
   these two principles and that are tested on the Penn Treebank and the
   Essen Folksong Collection. Our experiments show that (1) a combination
   of the two principles outperforms the use of either of them, and (2)
   exactly the same model with the same parameter setting achieves
   maximum accuracy for both language and music. We argue that our
   results suggest an interesting parallel between linguistic and musical
   structuring.