Please come by tomorrow to see Jeff Elman's Rumelhart talk!<br><br>*******************************************<br><div id="mb_0"><div style="direction: ltr;"><span name="st">CRL</span> Happy Half Hour @ <span style="font-weight: bold;">
2:30</span> in CSB 215<br><span name="st">CRL</span> Talk by Jeff Elman @ 4 in <span style="font-weight: bold;">CSB 003</span><br>*******************************************<br><br>Please note that the Happy Half Hour will be an earlier than usual time - please stop by to meet and greet the CRL community!
<br><br>The talk will also be held in CSB 003 -- not CSB 280 -- for this week only!<br><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br></span>"On words and dinosaur bones: Where is meaning?"<br>Jeff Elman<br>University of California, San Diego
<br><br>ABSTRACT<br><br>Virtually all theories of linguistics and of language processing assume<br>the language users possess a mental dictionary - the mental lexicon - in<br>which is stored critical knowledge of words. In recent years, the
<br>information that is assumed to be packed into the lexicon has grown<br>significantly. The role of context in modulating the interpretation of<br>words has also become increasingly apparent. Indeed, there exists now an
<br>embarrassment of riches which threatens the representational capacity of<br>the lexicon.<br><br>In this talk I will review some of these results, including recent<br>experimental work from adult psycholinguistics and child language
<br>acquisition, and suggest that the concept of a lexicon may be stretched<br>to the point where it is useful to consider alternative ways of<br>capturing the knowledge that language users have of words.<br><br>Following an idea suggested by Dave Rumelhart in the late 1970s, I will
<br>propose that rather than thinking of words as static representations<br>that are subject to mental processing-operands, in other words-they<br>might be better understood as operators, entities that operate directly<br>
on mental states in what can be formally understood as a dynamical<br>system. These effects are lawful and predictable, and it is these<br>regularities that we intuitively take as evidence of word knowledge.<br>This shift from words as operands to words as operators offers insights
<br>into a number of phenomena that I will discuss at the end of the talk.<br><br></div></div>