This "introductory meeting" of the TMR project on "Learning Computational Grammars" was structured as an "advanced course" in the 1998 Summer School of Groningen's graduate school in the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN). This format was chosen to encourage interest from cognitive neuroscientists in attendance at the BCN Summer School, and also to give TMR attendees the reciprocal opportunity to see the rest of BCN work. Evenings and lunches provided opportunities for project planning, and the final session was reserved for this.
The project was pleased to hear an invited guest lecture from Peter Culicover of The Ohio State University, one of the primary contributors to "Learnability Theory". Kenneth Wexler and Peter W. Culicover 1980 Formal Principles of Language Acquisition, Cambridge, MIT Press.
Week 1, advanced course, morning session, 9:00 - 12:00
Coordinators:
John Nerbonne (Computational Linguistics), Erhard Hinrichs (Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Tübingen)
Short course description:
The course "Computational Language Acquisition" approaches the issue of language acquisition from a computational perspective. Specifically, the course examines the potential of various techniques in machine learning, broadly viewed, to account for the knowledge that language learners acquire. The goals of the work are to understand language learning from this perspective, and perhaps to apply the knowledge so learned in language engineering applications. In comparison to psycholinguistic studies of acquisition, the work here will ignore e.g. the course of development, but it will pay more attention to the range of what is learned and it will study learning on large data sets.
Lectures:
June 29:
June 30:
Memory-Based Language Processing
July 1:
July 2:
July 3: