At next week’s meeting, Yves will be presenting the family of stochastic processes known as Dirichlet processes.

The Dirichlet distribution, a generalization of the Beta distribution, is a probabilistic distribution over a finite-dimensional categorical distribution. The Dirichlet process can be seen as an infinite-dimensional generalization of this which balances the trade-off between partitioning random observations into fewer or additional categories. I will describe this through the metaphor of the “Chinese restaurant process” and talk about its use in the fragment grammar model of morphological productivity.

We will be meeting at 5:30pm Wednesday November 28th in room 117.