[lingtalks] John Hale (Linguistics Colloquium)

[Klinton Bicknell]

I'm happy to announce that our upcoming linguistics colloquium will be John Hale, presenting a talk entitled "Quantifying Ambiguity Resolution with Information Theory". Professor Hale is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State, but on leave at Stanford this quarter. For more information, see his website at http://www.msu.edu/~jthale/ .

:: Details ::

Monday 30 October (1 week from today)
2-3:30pm
AP&M 4301

:: Abstract ::

QUANTIFYING AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION WITH INFORMATION THEORY

Ambiguities about grammatical category and syntactic structure permeate natural language.? Explaining human comprehenders' performance in the face of such confusion has been called the central problem in sentence processing (Tabor & Tanenhaus, 2001). How is it that human sentence understanders are able to recognize combinatory relationships, from an infinite range of possibilities, to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of a sentence?

This talk argues that an answer lies in formalizing the idea that comprehenders search the space of grammatical analyses in a way constrained by the words they hear. Comprehenders are constantly engaged in ambiguity resolution, and the more ambiguity is resolved, the longer they take.

To make this intuition fully explicit, ambiguity resolution will be given a precise interpretation in terms of information theory.

The general theory is tested using explicit grammar fragments that are probabilistic versions of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammars (Gazdar, Klein & Sag 1985) and Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 1997).

The theory will be shown to derive a range of documented processing phenomena including garden-path sentences, center-embedding, and the Accessibility (or Obliqueness) Hierarchy of relativized grammatical functions.


here is the bibliography for references in the abstract:

Gerald Gazdar, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum and Ivan Sag. 1985. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Harvard University Press.

Whitney Tabor and Michael K. Tanenhaus. 2001. "Dynamical Systems for Sentence Processing" in Connectionist Psycholinguistics, edited by Morten H. 
Christiansen and Nick Chater. Ablex.

Edward P. Stabler, Jr. 1997. ``Derivational Minimalism'' in Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, edited by Christian Retor. Springer-Verlag.