[lingtalks] TODAY: Frank Keller 6/12 (Linguistics Colloquium)

[Klinton Bicknell]

On Tuesday 12 June at 2:30pm, Frank Keller (University of Edinburgh; 
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/keller/) will give a colloquium at the 
UCSD Linguistics Department, in AP&M 4301.

:: Abstract ::

Probabilistic Models of Adaptation in Human Parsing

Frank Keller
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
keller at inf.ed.ac.uk

Experimental research in psycholinguistics has demonstrated a
parallelism effect in coordination: speakers are faster at processing
the second conjunct of a coordinate structure if it has the same
internal structure as the first conjunct. We show that this phenomenon
can be explained by the prevalence of parallel structures in corpus
data. We demonstrate that parallelism is not limited to coordination,
but also applies to arbitrary syntactic configurations, and even to
documents.

We then describe a method for incorporating priming into an
incremental probabilistic parser. Three models are compared, which
involve priming of rules between sentences, within sentences, and
within coordinate structures. These models simulate the reading time
advantage for parallel structures found in human data, and also yield
a small increase in overall parsing accuracy.

Taken together, the results from corpus studies and modeling
experiments indicate that the parallelism effect is an instance of a
general syntactic priming mechanism in human language processing,
rather than being due to a specialized copying strategy.

Joint work with Amit Dubey and Patrick Sturt.

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For further information about the Linguistics department colloquia 
series, including the schedule of future events, please visit 
http://ling.ucsd.edu/events/colloquia.html .