Dear Language Enthusiasts,
Our third LEAP meeting of Autumn Quarter will take place this Friday, 15 November at 11 am in Northwestern’s Kellogg Wieboldt Hall Room 413 (340 E Superior St, Chicago) and on Zoom. Julian Grove (Postdoctoral researcher, Linguistics, Univ. of Rochester) will be presenting. It will be a joint meeting with UChicago’s Language Processing Laboratory and Northwestern’s Experimental Meaning Group.
Title: Connecting probabilistic models and inference datasets to semantic theory
Abstract:
-The relatively recent advent of linguistic datasets and their associated statistical models have given rise to two major kinds of questions bearing on linguistic theory and methodology:
-How can semanticists use such datasets; specifically, how can the statistical properties of a dataset inform semantic theory directly, and what guiding principles regulate the link between such properties and semantic theory?
-How should semantic theories themselves be modified so that they may characterize not only informally collected acceptability and inference judgments, but statistical generalizations observed from datasets?
-I discuss how the compositional, algebraic view of meaning employed by semanticists can be brought into contact with linguistic datasets by introducing and applying the framework of Probabilistic Dynamic Semantics.