The Language Evolution, Acquisition and Processing (LEAP) workshop will be meeting Friday February 11th (11:00am – 12:20pm). Tal Linzen (NYU) will be joining us to talk about syntactic transformations in neural networks. Please find the abstract below.
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LEAP Meeting (February 11, 11:00am – 12:20pm) – Tal Linzen (NYU)
Inductive biases for the acquisition of syntactic transformations in neural networks: an interim update
One of the fundamental questions in the cognitive science of language concerns the conditions under which computational learners generalize from their input in a similar way to humans: by examining the effects of different learning assumptions on the generalizations acquired by the learner, we can construct hypotheses about the constraints and biases that underlie human learning. In this meeting, I will describe an ongoing long-term project with Bob Frank (Yale) and other colleagues, whose goal is to investigate this question using one type of behavior -- syntactic mappings between related forms (e.g., a declarative and a question) -- and a broad class of learners based on artificial neural networks. I have two goals for this session: first, to give an overview of the project and some of our results; and second, to obtain feedback about the ways this project (and others like it) can engage more productively with syntacticians, whether it is by addressing specific questions they are concerned with, by constructing tests for computational learners that incorporate challenging and subtle syntactic generalizations from a variety of languages, or in any other way.
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We plan on a hybrid meeting – feel free to join either in person at Rosenwald 432 (note the change from last quarter!) or over Zoom. Tal will be joining us remotely.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/94052449015?pwd=aUNQNU15RnQvSTIzd041dU5QK2t1dz09
Meeting ID: 940 5244 9015
Passcode: 151010