11 September 2011

Roger Levy speaks Friday, September 16

Joe Pater writes:

The Institute for Computational and Experimental Study of Language (suggested pronunciation: ['aisəl]) welcomes Roger Levy of the University of California, San Diego, who will present on "Probabilistic Knowledge and Uncertain Input in Rational Human Sentence Comprehension" on at 3:30, Friday September 16th in Machmer E-37. A reception will follow in South College.

Roger will be available for meetings on Friday morning from 9-12. Graduate students and post-docs are especially encouraged to meet with him. To sign up for a meeting, please indicate your available times here:

http://www.doodle.com/hqzwkrnacz4k79az

An abstract of Professor Levy's talk follows:

Considering the adversity of the conditions under which linguistic communication takes place in everyday life — ambiguity of the signal, environmental competition for our attention, speaker error, our limited memory, and so forth — it is perhaps remarkable that we are as successful at it as we are. Perhaps the leading explanation of this success is that (a) the linguistic signal is redundant, (b) diverse information sources are generally available that can help us obtain infer something close to the intended message when comprehending an utterance, and (c) we use these diverse information sources very quickly and to the fullest extent possible. This explanation suggests a theory of language comprehension as a rational, evidential process. In this talk, I describe recent research on how we can use the tools of computational linguistics to formalize and implement such a theory, and to apply it to a variety of problems in human sentence comprehension, subsuming both classic cases of garden-path disambiguation and syntactic processing difficulty patterns in the absence of structural ambiguity. In addition, I address a number of phenomena that remain clear puzzles for the rational approach, due to an apparent failure to use information available in a sentence appropriately in global or incremental inferences about the correct interpretation of a sentence. I argue that the apparent puzzle posed by these phenomena for models of rational sentence comprehension may derive from the failure of existing models to appropriately account for the environmental and cognitive constraints — in this case, the inherent uncertainty of perceptual input, and humans’ ability to compensate for it — under which comprehension takes place. I present a new probabilistic model of language comprehension under uncertain input and show that this model leads to solutions to the above puzzles. I also present behavioral data in support of novel predictions made by the model. More generally, I suggest that appropriately accounting for envir
onmental and cognitive constraints in probabilistic models can lead to a more nuanced and ultimately more satisfactory picture of key aspects of language processing and of human cognition.