[CL+NLP Lunch] next Tuesday at 12:30: Charles Kemp on Cross-Cultural Lexical Semantics

[Nathan Schneider]

A reminder that Charles Kemp's talk is tomorrow at 12:30. See you there!

Nathan & Ben

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 3:23 PM, Nathan Schneider <nathan at cmu.edu> wrote:

> All,
>
> We are excited to announce this month's CL+NLP Lunch:
>
> *Tuesday, March 15, 12:30pm*
> NSH 3305
> Food will be provided.
>
> *Charles Kemp*
> Professor, CMU Psychology
>
> *Cross-Cultural Lexical Semantics: The Case of Kinship*
>
> *Abstract:*
> Given any medium-sized set of items, the number of ways to organize these
> items into categories is vast. What are the principles that explain which
> categories humans choose to name? I will present a computational approach to
> lexical semantics and will apply it to the domain of kinship. The account is
> based on two fundamental principles: good systems of categories are simple,
> and they enable informative communication. I will show that kinship
> terminologies in the world's languages achieve a near-optimal tradeoff
> between these competing principles. I will also suggest that this
> general-purpose account helps to explain several specific constraints on kin
> classification proposed by previous researchers.
>
> (joint work with Terry Regier)
>
> *Bio:*
> Charles Kemp is based in the psychology department and works on
> probabilistic models of human learning and reasoning. Among other topics he
> is interested in the extent to which human language qualifies as a
> near-optimal communication system.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Nathan & Ben
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