At next week’s meeting, Amy and Benji will both give a presentation. Amy is going to present her project “Inference and Learnability over Minimalist Grammars” (abstract below). Benji is going to present the paper Parsing as Deduction (Pereira &Warren, 1093) (paper attached).
(Working) Title: Inference and Learnability over Minimalist Grammars
Abstract: This is a draft presentation of some of my current PhD research, intended for a more computationally-oriented audience. It contains collaborative work done over the past year with Eva Portelance (Stanford), Daniel Harasim (EPFL), and Leon Bergen (UCSD). Minimalist Grammars are a lexicalied grammar formalism inspired by Chomsky’s (1994) Minimalist Program, and as such are well suited to formalize theories in contemporary syntactic theory. Our work formulate a learning model based on the technique of Variational Bayesian Inference and apply the model to pilot experiments. In this presentation, I focus on giving an introduction to the central issues in syntactic theory and motivating the problems we wish to address. I give an introduction to syntactic theory and formal grammars, and demonstrate why context free grammars are insufficient to adequately characterize natural language. Minimalist Grammars, a lexicalized mildly context-sensitive formalism are introduced as a more linguistically adequate formalism.
We will meet Wednesday at 5:30pm in room 117. Food will be provided.