Monday, December 15, 2008

Systemic Functional Linguistics

source: http://www.isfla.org/Systemics/


Systemics & Computation


SFL has been prominent in computational linguistics, especially in Natural Language Generation (NLG). Penman, an NLG system started at Information Sciences Institute in 1980, is one of the three main such systems, and has influenced much of the work in the field. John Bateman (currently in Bremen, Germany) has extended this system into a multilingual text generator, KPML. Robin Fawcett in Cardiff have developed another systemic generator, called Genesys. Mick O'Donnell has developed yet another system, called WAG. Numerous other systems have been built using Systemic grammar, either in whole or in part.

Macquarie U in Sydney is a center for SFL, and at PACLIC I met Trevor Johnston who helped develop the Australian Sign Bank. Dick Hudson's Word Grammar is considered a spin-off that is based on dependency grammar. Geoffrey Huddleston, co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language with Geoffrey Pullum, has worked in that tradition. CGEL was cited by Culicover and Jackendoff as the right level of analysis for their Simpler Syntax approach (which addresses the syntactic part of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture framework).

Saturday, December 13, 2008

links - logic - Fefferman on Tarskian semantics

"Tarski’s Conceptual Analysis of Semantical Notions"

http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/conceptanalysis.pdf

Expanded text of a lecture for the Colloque, “Sémantique et épistémologie”, Casablanca, April 24-26, 2002. 
27 pp.

T's notions of
  • truth for formal languages and the allied notions of 
  • satisfaction, 
  • definability, and 
  • logical consequence
two questions are of interest. 
  1.  what motivated Tarski to make these analyses, and 
  2.  what led to their particular form?
Turing's concept of computability
  • how? the general notion of a computing machine
  • why? a precise notion of computability was needed to show that certain problems (and specifically the Entscheidungsproblem in logic) are uncomputable
Tarski's concept of truth
  • how? his definition of truth is given in general set-theoretical terms
  • why? no similarly compelling logical reason for Tarski’s work on the concept of truth, and will suggest instead a combination of 
    1. psychological and
    2. programmatic reasons
The main puzzle to be dealt with has to do with the relations between the notions of 
  • truth in a structure and
  • absolute truth

Thursday, November 27, 2008

evo1: Vocalization Displays and the Recognition of Typed Object-Features

The evolution of language is difficult to explain. It is a complex faculty with various aspects or components, and it is difficult to see why rudimentary versions of those aspects would have selectional advantages for differential reproduction in hominids. It would be helpful to identify preadaptations, particular characters that developed complexity in some other function, that came to be used in a new function of language-based communication.

My working hypothesis is that the capacity for visual recognition of objects and scenes, specifically recognition of physical objects and behaving animals in the shared immediate social environment of hominids, gave rise to a complex of preadaptations for language. One preadaptation is 1) a shared conceptual scheme of individuation, where certain scenes were classified as involving significant happenings or objects. This scheme would eventually give rise to the mental lexicon, and the related capacity for semantic memory. Another is 2) the capacity to represent a scene and individual objects in terms of typed structures of object-features. By the hyphenated term object-feature, I refer specifically to higher level visual features like shape outline and component shape, that are distinguished from low level features like edge or color or texture. Both these preadaptations were refined and repurposed in the context of 3) recognizing social displays of individuals of the same species. Some displays, like pointing, have 4) a property of intentionality. Intentional displays are produced to trigger an observer's attunement to a relation between the structure of the display and a scene where some salient aspects are referenced (physical objects in the immediate environment are referred to by a shift of gaze or a hand movement, happenings are referenced in relation to a doer or an undergoer). Clearly vocalization displays are core to the evolution of language, but gestural displays that support the repeated emergence of sign languages (among deaf and hearing communities) are also of research interest.

How did the use of articulatory gestures in vocalization evolve into phonology? One possibility is song, perhaps evolved from gibbon-like vocalizations to mark territory. Tone is differentiated and evolves to be worth remembering, so song is born. The continuous articulation of vowels is another dimension of song, and this could eventually evolve into a phonemic set of distinguished vowel phonemes. Why would consonants and syllabification be added to the mix? Why would song recognition and articulation capacities get repurposed for referring gestures, replacing eye gaze and pointing with nouns or noun phrases?

From studying the semantics-syntax interface, we can theorize about two large layers in the structure of utterances. These layers define the linguitic types that an utterance (or sign language expression) is recognized to instantiate. One layer is the referring expression, where an concrete object or abstraction is referred to and a corresponding mental concept takes a place in a shared information structure where it could be referred to again. In other words, referring expressions introduce referential indices into discourse, and create the possibility of anaphoric resolution. We have three levels here:
  1. the etic level of a complex nominal utterance in the context where the speaker picks out a particular situation for the listener,
  2. the emic level of the types from the mental lexicon and language faculty that recognize the utterance as an instance of a structure phrasal type involving lexical items and a distinguished head item, and
  3. the level of the shared information state including referential indices.
The other large layer is that of speech acts made with clausal utterances (or the sentences used in them), that introduce a semantics and pragmatics of what Searle calls conditions of satisfaction. In a request, the shared information state is about a state which does not obtain but where the listener can act to fulfill those conditions. A promise mentions a possible future state where the the speaker (or signer) will act to fulfill the conditions. And an assertive speech act calls attention to a state where the situation referred to (a visible scene, or some abstract situation) has the participants referred to with referential indexes, and they stand in a happening-relation mentioned by the head verb or predicator. Any modifiers also introduce properties of the participants or situation. Returning to the three levels, at
  1. the etic level, a clausal utterance is used to perform a speech act between speaker and listener
  2. the emic level, a sentence or clause is recognized as consisting of a head verb, arguments that have dependency relations to that verb, and additional modifiers
  3. the shared information state level, of a discourse representation structure where referential indexes are resolved to salient items in discourse, creating shared attunement to a described situation, which may be a part of the concrete situation surrounding speaker and listener, or else a more abstract situation that does not (yet) exist in the physical surroundings.
This is the rudimentary model of language that I am using. I would need to demonstrate that a language faculty that supports this model is systematically related to existing visual recognition faculties (of objects, scenes and social displays) that provided some preadaptations for the relatively rapid emergence of complex language among hominids

First I will discuss typed feature structures in language and high-level vision, then I will discuss shared schemes of information in gestural displays and language. Future posts will cover:
  • Feature structures for phrasal features and visual object-features and scenes
  • Typing and semantic memory
  • Schemes of individuation
  • Shared schemes and the first-person character of perceptual qualia
  • Types in the mental lexicon

A Minimalist Theory with Untyped Features

I read a review by Ash Asudeh and Ida Toivonen of two introductory textbooks on Minimalism. What interests me is the book by Adger:

David Adger, Core syntax: a Minimalist approach. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+424.

This is described as developing a specific coherent theory within the Minimalist Program, and it ends up being close to a lexicalist unification grammar. Like LFG, and unlike HPSG, the feature theory is untyped.

I don't know if there will be a lot of interest, but it may be useful to have a P&P (GB and/or MP) syntax module that can be plugged in to a Linguistic Exploration Environment. Adger's version may be a candidate, because it is more formalizable, and may have some compatibility at the level of feature theory. This allows a clearer connection to the lexicon.

I also have been reading the critique of GB and MP in Culicover and Jackendoff's Simpler Syntax. I am also interested in GB, because Paul Llido uses it in studying Case in Cebuano, mixing it with LFG.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

forthcoming books by Stephen Wechsler

  1. Wechsler,  Stephen (in progress). The Syntax-Lexicon Interface (working title). Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology, General editor: Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.  Oxford University Press, Oxford. 

  2. Asudeh, Ash, Joan Bresnan, Ida Toivonen, and Stephen Wechsler (in progress).   Lexical Functional Syntax.  Blackwell Publishers.  
It seems Wechsler is now doing LFG, although he has worked extensively in HPSG. I think the crossfertilization between the two is healthy, I Wayan Arka is also working on LFG for Indonesian, and he has collaborated with Wechsler on HPSG

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Constructional Semantics

There has been extensive research on Lexical Semantics (e.g. Levin, Pustejovsky), often presuming a bottom-up compositionality. This is sometimes contrasted with a Phrasal Semantics that is often in the tradition of Montague grammar, focusing on issues like anaphora and scoping, often assuming that each lexical token contributes one atomic symbol to a semantic representation.

Rather than talk about Phrasal Semantics directly, I will assume that the semantical representation of a phrasal expression can be decomposed into both a lexical contribution and a constructional contribution. Compositionality is still possible, but it involves both bottom-up and top-down contributions.

An initial focus will be Argument Structure Constructions (ASCx) of verbs, such as those analyzed by Goldberg for English. However, I am also interested in modeling Austronesian morphosyntactic alignment (comparing with Llido's analysis of Cebuano, for example). I am assuming that related but distinct senses of a lexical entry are actually expression-level construal from combining fewer word senses with meaning-contributing constructions, especially ASCx's. It is possible that a set of related lexical entry senses are actually the same underlying word sense distinguished in usage by the constructions forming different expressions. It is further possible that the constructions are actually related constructions, perhaps linked by inheritance (Goldberg proposes several distinct types of Inheritance, some of which involve Lakoff-style metaphor).

Whether this approach captures a significant amount of generality about lexical senses can be explored empirically. If this proves productive, it could later be incorporated into a linguistic exploration environment.

A gold standard for distinguishing senses in a lexical entry using a corpus-based approach is the COBUILD dictionary of English. Each entry has a stylized definition, which generally picks out the typical arguments of the verb, including a common noun as a general type constraint for each argument. To some extent, it identifies other participants in the mentioned situation which may not be explicitly realized in arguments. These additional participants may be a mechanism for characterizing the connotations of a specific sense.

I propose to explore some of the most common verbs of English (those in the top tier of of 680+ most frequent used lexical entries). For the sample sentences of each sense (and perhaps additional sentences from the underlying corpus, the Bank of English), I would try to identify any ASCx, based on typical arguments for that sense. Closely related senses may have related constructions imposed on the same underlying verb sense.

Multilingual Explorations

It may be useful to compare several languages at this level of semantics, for example Chinese or German or Filipino or Cebuano. I am interested if there are potential applications in basic education, adult L2 education, human translation, machine assisted translation, etc. This may also be relevant to the documentation and description of less studied languages by people more familiar with another more widespread language (the SIL use cases for Fieldworks).

Monday, November 17, 2008

teasing apart "word sense"

Analysis of "word sense"

From the point of view of constructions, a c:lexical_sense contributes only part of the meaning of a c:word_usage. The construction itself contributes something additional, which also interacts with the larger discourse environment and the social context of successful communication.

We can divide the meaning of a c:word_usage into a purely semantic representation, which is the typical meaning of the sentence being used. Or even a simplified form of the basic sentence, with only head words and abstracting from embellishments that don't contribute to a specified lexical sense. The semantic representation includes the literal meaning, but may also introduce additional roles that follow from "typically" understood arguments and properties of the explicitly mentioned words. It covers denotation and the related intensional functions, as well as connotations relative to a "typical" mental lexicon (perhaps of an ideal listener/reader).

In addition to the purely semantic representation, competent language users can infer a more c:pragmatic_construal of the c:word_usage.

In the context of the COBUILD lexical word senses and the Bank of English used to generate them, a distinguished lexical sense classifies a class of sentences which share a similar word_usage. It should be possible to isolate the intuitions of this "gold standard" classification into a semantic representation. This abstracts from less reproducible aspects of pragmatic construal, and focuses on what is typically inferred from the sentence itself, as if it were used in isolation rather that in a larger discourse or social situation.

We would like to tease apart the characterization of each lexical sense as a purely semantic representation into two parts, the contribution of the word (e.g. a free morpheme verb, or the stem of an inflected verb) from the contribution of the construction or constructions (including morphological constructions, and argument structure constructions at least).

We would like to discover if the set of lexical senses of a word (initially, some of the more frequently used verbs) can be characterized with a set of constructions related by the inheritance relations distinguished by Goldberg. We also want to see to what extent these constructions are reused across different verbs, and if we can identify verb classes that share the same inheritance-related constructions.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Intelligent Agents for User Interface

I watched a TechTalk at Google (July 25, 2008) that may be relevant to designing an annotation interface for linguistic exploration. In "Intelligent Assistance for Desktop User Tasks" Anthony Tomasic talked about work with John Zimmerman integrating machine learning with UI Design: VIO (being commercialized for SalesForce.com) selects and pre-fills forms from email, and Mixer generates database queries from email. VIO intentionally avoids NLP or domain-specific explicit engineering, looking to evaluate a lightweight solution.

The experience highlights how little I know about machine learning. VIO uses K-way classification (form suggestion), Conditional Random Fields (field s.) and Reference Resolution over instances (instance s.), which is all greek to me. The work is an example of empirical methods, they train their analyzers and evaluate them with experiements on real users.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Regional Dictionary of Biography

I was browsing the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which is an ANU project that documents Australians with either 2000-6000 words, or 500-2000 words. It tries to be "representative" and has a number of biographies of Aborigines, assigning them occupations like "indigenous culture informant".

It would be great to create a similar resource about prominent Filipinos, and I suggest a regional focus to ensure that every ethnic group is covered. We could start immediately with a Cebuano region initiative, then work with the rest of UPV to cover the Visayas. 

I am sure many towns would be interested in their local history, so we could start with trying to document the most prominent individuals who were born or have lived in a given municipality. I am thinking of Todd Lucero Sales' recent publication, Argao: 400 Years in Legend and History (Argao, 2008). Perhaps I can interest Madrileña de la Cerna of UP Cebu in this project.


Monday, November 3, 2008

Case and voice systems in Cebuano

I have been planning to study the syntactic side of argument structure in Cebuano.

The trigger is Paul Llido's paper from ICAL 10 in Palawan, "Inflectional Case Assignment in Cebuano"

This references Yehuda Falk's paper "Case Typology and Case Theory"

I should look at the attitude towards VSO, etc. typology in WALS (World Atlas of Linguistic Structures).

There is also the following exchange from LFG98.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Describing Language 2/2 (meaning structures)

Accepting phonology, the original generative problem was to model a string of tokens that are wordforms or morphs. However, the type-token distinction is abandoned with the commitment to competence modeling independent of performance. Token strings are demarcated by speech acts (clauses). A narrowly syntactic meaning of grammar is a generative production system (a set of combinatorial rules) that specifies soundly and completely the licensed set of strings. A state-machine generating strings.

This elevates the importance of not just word classes, but also the non-terminal categories or phrasal categories as the discrete tokens or alphabet for the generated strings.

Later, the alphabet of tokens can be replaced with feature-bundles. So the syntax rules can work over string of feature bundles.

An additional move in the mainstream generative grammar tradition (of Chomsky) is to allow tree-to-tree transformations. This is somewhat proof theoretic, rather than purely model theoretic. Non-reversible (thus not non-declarative) transformation rules somewhat correspond to proof steps. However, this was before the proofs-as-types approach (via the Curry-Howard isomorphism) brought out the equivalence of proof theory and model theory. For the critics in the declarative grammar traditions, the transformational move is a bad move that gives up the precision of modeling, and allows the theory to model anything rather than just reality. It also is the cultural foundation for a mainstream generative grammar to twiddle with perfecting the theory with internal concerns like minimalism, rather than sharpen the fit with ever broader data. 

Graddol et al [1994] compare mainstream generative grammar with the systemic grammar alternative: "The framework that is used for analysing language has to be extravagant rather than economical. Where universal grammar seeks simplicity and economy, and draws on intuition [of competence] as its main data, systemic-functional grammar attempts to be comprehensive and gives much more emphasis to 'real' language that has been spoken or written."

Recently, declarative generative grammar approaches are converging with cognitive grammar, paying attention to performance and retaining the precision of generative models while taking on the early ambitions of systemic grammar to broadly model language in use.

Pollard in Convergent Grammar is also reclaiming a proof-theoretic approach, carried forward by Categorial Grammar, by bringing it in line with type-theoretic declarative grammars.

Jackendoff and Culicover are less concerned with building elaborate internal mechanisms for declarative grammar, although they are happy to inherit the detailed analysis of the generative tradition. They propose a flat model of syntax, returning to simple strings of tokens, with just enough structure in the representation to support the semantics-syntax interface and other interfaces in their parallel architecture.

HPSG is one of the more elaborate declarative grammar approaches, and while it remains compatible with the concerns of Jackendoff and Culicover, they make a series of moves that allow precise modeling of syntax and perhaps semantics as well. It would be nice if language specialists can model grammar in the flat simpler syntax, which the linguistic exploration environment generates the complex representations of HPSG in the background.

HPSG moves away from strings of feature bundles combined according to atomic phrasal categories. The features in a bundle allow recursive feature values, so each terminal category becomes itself a tree. The phrasal categories are also recursive feature structures, that duplicate (or in fact share) features from their constituents, notably heads pass certain features up to the phrase. By sharing rather than duplicating, the trees become directed graphs. This very expressive structure is tightly constrained by a set of type labels for nodes, with feature labels for edges. There is a type subsumption hierarchy as well. 

Note that every utterance is modeled as a large graph where phrases are subgraphs, and wordforms are subgraphs in turn. These graphs are complete or sort-resolved [review Carpenter's distinctions], but the wordtypes or morphemes in the lexical unit are not complete, they are partial descriptions. These types are less specific than the token-level utterances and utterance fragments that they model, and they allow the complete structures to be generated from the partial feature descriptions in the lexicon.

HPSG was designed to work with the model-theoretic approach to modeling semantics of Montague Grammar (usually associated with Categorial Grammar for syntax). A related model-theoretic approach to modeling semantics is Minimal Recursion Semantics (and recently Robust MRS). 

I am dissatisfied with the propositional level addressed by these model-theoretic approaches, but it is early days yet in semantic modeling. The traditional emphasis has been set-theoretic concerns like the scoping of quantifiers. I am interested in richer semantic representations than austere sets. Situation theory may fit the bill, but a lot of work needs to be done, especially at the semantics-syntax interface.

At this interface, I am interested in integrating the contributions of Construction Grammar and Jackendoff's parallel architecture. I am also interested in insights from lexical semantics (Levin, Pustejovsky).

A lexical unit, when we model it for some application, provides explicit and implicit information that is realized in the wordforms of an utterance. The prepositional level, including the conceptual structures of Jackendoff, is the more or less explicit level (some semantic elements in the conceptual or propositional structure may be implicit in the syntax, derivable from a fixed Event ontology). I believe that we can reuse some of this conceptual machinery for the implicit connoted information of individual word senses as well. 

A lexical unit does not characterize a single unique meaning in usage, it subsumes a collection of related senses with the same wordform. Some of the meaning in usage may come from the construction, but perhaps a sense (learned from the shifting fads of usage, and construals passed on in a speaker's own utterances) brings in an additional circle of implicit concepts and conceptual relations. 

For example, not all senses of "break" have an implicit participant of pieces, or the idea of sudden separation. But one fairly common sense does carry such information implicitly. What is explicit are the participant roles with arguments or complements, filled in the utterance by particular individuals of a noun (or referential index) type. What allows a hearer to zero in on one familiar sense or another, or to realize that this is a new sense in usage, is the outer circle of concepts that are implicit. So if one of the participants mentioned in an argument is a piece, then this sense or a related one is specified.

Where is the boundary between construal in performance, and precise type representation in competence? In the brain, there is certainly a fluid spectrum. For applications in computers, we would like to fix a particular discrete model. The account above can clarify some of the choices to fix.

Describing Language 1/2 (sounds and words)

We observe humans making not just vocalizations (social displays) but utterances.

An utterance makes a cognitive speech act, engendering a shared information state and modulating movement and cognitively-controlled behavior. There is intentionality between that shared information state (as well as the acoustic utterance, or inscribed expression) and the actual or possbible situations that it is about.

What is perceptible in an utterance, or a sequence of utterances, is a string of phones.

The phones are clustered in cognition into words that bear a functional or substantive contribution to the shared information structure

In the thirties, it was discovered that not all distinct phones are functionally distinct. The allows the layering of distinctions between phonetic distinctions on the one hand, that may be governed for example by articulatory constraints, and phonemic distinctions on the other hand.
Phonemes classify segments (possibly a set of allophones) according to a phonological level that is the only interface with larger structure, such as semantics and morpho-syntax.

Thus the informal notion of words can be analyzed into strings of phonemic segments, as well as some supra-segmental phenomena. Some groups of segments carry conceptual contributions (substantive morphemes) to shared information structure, others only modulate how concepts are inter-related (functional morphemes, bound or free). This is hypothesized to account for the partitioning of all words into a group of open classes of words (words with a substantive morpheme at its core, possibly productively inflected with a bound morpheme; and perhaps historically derived in lexicon with a bound morpheme) and a group of closed word classes.

Can we marshall evidence for this substantive/functional = open/closed hypothesis? What about prepositions used either predicatively, as PP heads or as particles with phrasal verbs. They do contribute to conceptual structure, but are in a closed class. Perhaps there are only so many ways to stand in physical relations in a situation, and other meanings are metaphors, so the substantivity is in the construction layer rather than the morpheme layer. A predicative construction injects a substantive concept. Non-predicative uses allow participants to stand at the level of bare furniture of the mechanisms of language. The upholstery of substantivity is what contributes connotations, the implicit participants that carries meanings beyond the bare prepositions of logical form. The model of functionals allows a fixed inventory of relations, then substantives from the lexicon elaborate that bare level.

Abandoning the furniture metaphor, we could talk about three or four circles of meaning. 1) A bare level of participants (with referential indexes tracked and resolved) in (more or less) spatiotemporal relations, 2) a propositional semantics level where every substantive contributes exactly one concept type or relational concept type (like Sowa's conceptual graphs) 3) an Event semantics level (like that being developed by Levin and perhaps Jackendoff) which uses a minimal ontology of types that are revealed but perhaps implicitly in syntax, and 4) the additional implicit participants in the shared information state that are connoted by specific word senses, acquired by communicative experience.

We can distinguish wordforms in utterances, that carry the contextual meaning of a speech act (or written expression act), as a level of tokens, distinct but inextricably related to a level of types.

Types are wordtypes (lexical units) or morphemes in the shared scheme of individuation of speaker-hearers in the speech community. Wordforms are tokens of wordtypes participating in a particular utterance, and contributing in context to the shared information structure. We classify wordforms (at run-time, in occurrent cognitive states) according to their properties in the utterance and shared information state, both syntactic distribution and the situated meaning. This does not the extralinguistic significance of pragmatics, just the linguistic shared information state.

When we construct a level of description of lexical units (words, and also bound and free functional morphemes), where we model the shared regularities that allow the interpretation and semantic-syntactic generation of shared information states.

Note: Morphological rules may govern parts of the phonology-syntax interface, e.g. go + ed >> went, irregular verbs.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Leipzig glossing rules

Part of Typological tools for field linguistics

a consistent and widely accepted standard for the interlinear glossing of text

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/LGR08_09_12.pdf

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php

Appendix: List of Standard Abbreviations

1first person
2second person
3third person
Aagent-like argument of canonical transitive verb
ABLablative
ABSabsolutive
ACCaccusative
ADJadjective
ADVadverb(ial)
AGRagreement
ALLallative
ANTIPantipassive
APPLapplicative
ARTarticle
AUXauxiliary
BENbenefactive
CAUScausative
CLFclassifier
COMcomitative
COMPcomplementizer
COMPLcompletive
CONDconditional
COPcopula
CVBconverb
DATdative
DECLdeclarative
DEFdefinite
DEMdemonstrative
DETdeterminer
DISTdistal
DISTRdistributive
DUdual
DURdurative
ERGergative
EXCLexclusive
Ffeminine
FOCfocus
FUTfuture
GENgenitive
IMPimperative
INCLinclusive
INDindicative
INDFindefinite
INFinfinitive
INSinstrumental
INTRintransitive
IPFVimperfective
IRRirrealis
LOClocative
Mmasculine
Nneuter
N-non- (e.g. NSG nonsingular, NPST nonpast)
NEGnegation, negative
NMLZnominalizer/nominalization
NOMnominative
OBJobject
OBLoblique
Ppatient-like argument of canonical transitive verb
PASSpassive
PFVperfective
PLplural
POSSpossessive
PREDpredicative
PRFperfect
PRSpresent
PROGprogressive
PROHprohibitive
PROXproximal/proximate
PSTpast
PTCPparticiple
PURPpurposive
Qquestion particle/marker
QUOTquotative
RECPreciprocal
REFLreflexive
RELrelative
RESresultative
Ssingle argument of canonical intransitive verb
SBJsubject
SBJVsubjunctive
SGsingular
TOPtopic
TRtransitive
VOCvocative


Jackendoff article

Construction after construction and its theoretical challenges by Ray Jackendoff
Language 84-1

This analyzes NPN constructions like "day by day" where both N's are the same. There are five propositions that are used: by, for, to, after and upon (with on as a variant).

On the connectionist front, I came across this paper:

Vector Symbolic Architectures answer Jackendoff's challenges for cognitive neuroscience

Gayler, Dr Ross W. (2003) Vector Symbolic Architectures answer Jackendoff's challenges for cognitive neuroscience. [Conference Paper] (Unpublished)

PDF
58Kb



Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Central Okinawan is endangered with 1 million speakers

^ Japan Focus: Language Loss and Revitalization in the Ryukyu Islands, Patrick Heinrich, posted November 10, 2005. Also | What leaves a mark should no longer stain: Progressive erasure and reversing language shift activities in the Ryukyu Islands, 2005, citing Hattori, Shirō (1954) 'Gengo nendaigaku sunawachi goi tokeigaku no hōhō ni tsuite' [‘Concerning the Method of Glottochronology and Lexicostatistics’], Gengo kenkyū [Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan] v26/27

Are there Tagalog verbal roots? - Himmelmann

Tagalog semantics/lexical categories (or: "word classes") from Nikolaus Himmelmann at Bochum (also working with a Monash project).

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1987. Morphosyntax und Morphologie - Die Ausrichtungsaffixe im Tagalog. München: Fink.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1991. The Philippine Challenge to Universal Grammar. Arbeitspapier Nr. 15. Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. ”Regularity in irregularity: Article use in adpositional phrases”. Linguistic Typology 2:315-353.

Himmelmann is a pioneer in defining the emerging subdiscipline within linguistics of language documentation and description, as a response to the crisis of endangered languages that has been accelerating over the last century and more. He is quoted at the website of the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Project:

The aim of a language documentation is to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community... This... differs fundamentally from... language description [which] aims at the record of a language... as a system of abstract elements, constructions, and rules 

[p, 166, "Documentary and descriptive linguistics", Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (1998). Linguistics 36. pp. 161-195. Berlin: de Gruyter]


At Bochum and Köln, Leila Behrens is looking at the lexical typology of Tagalog.

"Die zweite Datenbankkomponente ist als Grundstein für ein neues Tagalog-Lexikon gedacht"

"Wenngleich wir nichts dagegen haben, unsere "Prinz"-Datenbank oder die "Tagalog"-Datenbank im Netz öffentlich zugänglich zu machen, erscheint uns das momentan aus dem genannten Grund noch als verfrüht."

Behrens & Sasse, H.-J. (1997), Lexical Typology: A Programmatic Sketch. Arbeitspapier Nr. 30 (Neue Folge). Institut für Sprachwissenschaft zu Köln.

- (2000), Semantics and Typology. In: Siemund, Peter (ed.), Methodology in Linguistic Typology. STUF 53 (1), 21-38.




Notes

"This proposal extends to the lexical level recent work challenging the categorial uniformity hypothesis (Bresnan 1994)"

Bresnan, Joan, 1994, ”Locative inversion and the architecture of Universal Grammar”. Language 70:72-131

"Therefore, it is not possible to define the subject simply as the phrase marked by ang. Instead, the subject is defined as the ang-phrase which follows the predicate (and there can be only one"

"if the predicate is marked with the CONVEYANCE VOICE prefix i-, then the subject expresses an argument bearing the semantic role of a displaced theme. ...(i.e. the entity viewed as moving) of the event expressed by the predicate"

"The suffix -an marks LOCATIVE VOICE. In locative voice, the subject expresses a locative argument, understood in a very broad sense. This may be the location at which something happened:
(11) tinirhán ko ang bahay na itó
Or the location to which (or from which) motion occurred:
(12) pinuntahán na namán nilá ang bata'
Locative voice is also used for recipients, addressees, and benefactees (13):
(13) tìtirán ninyó akó
Even more generally, locative voice may be used for all kinds of undergoers which are not directly affected by the action denoted by the predicate
(14) hindí'! tingnán mo si Maria
"

"The suffix -in marks PATIENT VOICE. It is the unmarked member of the undergoer-voice-marking affixes and is used for a broad variety of undergoers, including prototypical patients, i.e. entities directly affected or effected by the event denoted by the predicate:
(16) patayín natin itóng dalawang Hapón
The suffix -in differs from the other two undergoer suffixes in that it only occurs in non-realis mood (as in the preceding example). In realis mood, the predicate is simply marked by the realis undergoer voice infix -in-:"

(18) pùpunuín mo iyán ng kuto
pupunuin ng weyter ang baso ng tubigh
Why is the non-subject actor immediately after the predicate? Is linear order governed by thematic role rather than grammatical function?

"The locative marker sa marks a large variety of temporal and local adjuncts (20) and recipients/goals (21), as well as (some) definite patients and themes when they do not occur in subject function (cf. sa mga bata’ in (4) above)
(4) ang langgám rin ang tumulong sa mga bata’
"
I would analyze /bata'/ as a beneficiary, and thus a recipient rather than a patient

"To summarize: the four basic syntactic functions predicate, subject, non-subject argument or adjunct, and modifier are easily identifiable in Tagalog because there is a set of markers which in combination with a few positional restrictions allows a straightforward identification of each of these functions (with the exception of the modifier function which necessarily involves reference to the semantics of the two items joined by a linker)."

"However, it is common to assume that terminal syntactic categories and lexical categories are commensurate in that lexical categories are but further subcategorisations of the more general terminal syntactic categories. That is, declension classes are but a further subcategorisation of the superclass of nouns, verb classes just a further subcategorisation of the superclass of verbs, etc. Such a neat correlation between terminal syntactic categories and lexical categories in fact appears to exist in a number of languages (including, in particular, the Indo-European languages), but this is not universally so."


Of major interest

DeWolf, Charles M. 1979. Sentential Predicates: A Cross-Linguistic Analysis. Honululu: University of Hawaii dissertation.
DeWolf, Charles M. 1988. ”Voice in Austronesian languages of Philippine type: passive, ergative, or neither?”. In: Shibatani (ed.) 143-193.
Wolff, John U. 1993. ”Why roots add the affixes with which they occur”. In: Reesink (ed.) 217-244.
Gil, David. 1993. ”Tagalog Semantics”. BLS 19: 390-403.
Guzman, Videa P. de. 1978. Syntactic Derivation of Tagalog Verbs. Honululu: University Press of Hawaii.
Guzman, Videa P. de. 1997. ”Verbal affixes in Tagalog: Inflection or derivation?”. In: Odé, Cecilia & Wim Stokhof (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, 303-325. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Naylor, Paz B. 1980. ”Linking, Relation-Marking, and Tagalog Syntax”. In: id. (ed.), Austronesian Studies, Papers from the 2. Eastern Conference on Austronesian Languages, 33-49. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan.
Kaswanti Purwo, Bambang (ed.). 1984. Towards a description of contemporary Indonesian: Preliminary Studies. Part I, Jakarta: Universitas Atma Jaya (=NUSA 18).
Clynes, Adrian. 1995. Topics in the phonology and morphosyntax of Balinese, based on the dialect of Singaraja, North Bali. PhD thesis, The Australian Nationa University.
Artawa, Ketut & Barry J. Blake. 1997. ”Patient Primacy in Balinese”. Studies in Language 21:483-508.

Other references in the paper

Anward, Jan, Edith Moravcsik & Leon Stassen. 1997. ”Parts of speech: A challenge for typology”. Linguistic Typology 1:167-183.
Austin, Peter & Joan Bresnan. 1996. ”Non-Configurationality in Australian Aboriginal Languages”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14:215-268.
Broschart, Jürgen. 1997. ”Why Tongan does it differently: Categorial distinctions in a language without nouns and verbs”. Linguistic Typology 1:123-165.
Jacobs, Joachim, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Theo Vennemann (eds.). 1993. Syntax, Berlin: de Gruyter.
Jelinek, Eloise & Richard A. Demers. 1994. ”Predicates and pronominal arguments in Straits Salish”. Language 70:697-736.
Koptevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 1988. A typology of action nominal constructions. PhD thesis Stockholm University.
Lemaréchal, Alain. 1982. ”Semantisme des parties du discours et semantisme des relations”. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 77:1-39.
Lemaréchal, Alain. 1989. Les parties du discours. Sémantiquie et syntaxe. Paris: P.U.F.
Li, Charles N. (ed.). 1976. Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press.
McFarland, Curtis D. 1976. A Provisional Classification of Tagalog Verbs. Tokio: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
Naylor, Paz B. 1995. ”Subject, Topic, and Tagalog syntax”. In: Benett, David, Bynon, Theodora and Hewitt, George B. (eds.), Subject, Voice and Ergativity 161-201. London: SOAS.
Pittman, Richard, 1966, ”Tagalog -um- and mag-. An Interim Report”. Papers in Philippine Linguistics 1:9-20 (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Series A, Nr.8).
Ramos, Teresita V. 1974. The Case system of Tagalog verbs. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics (Series B-27) .
Ramos, Teresita V. 1975. ”The Role of Verbal Features in the Subcategorization of Tagalog Verbs”. Philippine Journal of Linguistics 6:1-24.
Reesink, Ger P. (ed.). 1993. Topics in Descriptive Austronesian Linguistics. Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azië en Oceanië (= Semaian 11).
Rubino, Carl R.G. 1998b. ”The morphological realization and production of a nonprototypical morpheme: the Tagalog derivational clitic”. Linguistics 36:1147-1166.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1993a. ”Syntactic Categories and subcategories”. In: Jacobs et al. (eds.) 646-686.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1993b. ”Das Nomen - eine universale Kategorie?”. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 46:187-221.
"two kinds of categorisation (lexical and syntactic/phrasal) should be clearly distinguished and that there is no necessary correlation between them."
Linguistics vol. 15. Los Angeles: UCLA/Department of Linguistics.
Shibatani, Masayoshi (ed.). 1988. Passive and Voice. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Verhaar, John W.M. 1984. Affixation in contemporary Indonesian”. in: Kaswanti Purwo (ed.) 1-26.
Walter, Heribert. 1981. Studien zur Nomen-Verb-Distinktionaus typologischer Sicht. München: Fink

Standard references

Müller, Friedrich. 1882. Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft. Bd.II, Abt.2. Wien: Alfred Hölder.
31

Blake, Frank R. 1925. A Grammar of the Tagalog Language. New Haven: American Oriental Society.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1917. Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis. 3 vols. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois.
Scheerer, Otto. 1924. ”On the Essential Difference Betweenthe Verbs of the European and the Philippine Languages”. Philippine Journal of Education 7:1-10.
Lopez, Cecilio. 1937. ”Preliminary Study of Affixes in Tagalog”. In: id. 1977, Selected Writings in Philippine Linguistics, 28-104. Quezon City: University of the Philippines.
Capell, Arthur. 1964. ”Verbal systems in Philippine languages”. Philippine Journal of Science 93:231-249.
Ramos, Teresita V. 1971. Tagalog Structures. Honululu: Univ. Press of Hawaii .
Schachter, Paul & Fay Otanes. 1972. Tagalog Reference Grammar. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Schachter, Paul. 1976. ”The Subject in Philippine Languages, Topic, Actor, Actor-Topic or None of the Above”. In: Li (ed.) 491-518.
Schachter, Paul. 1995. The Subject in Tagalog: Still none of the above. UCLA Occasional Papers in

Cruz, Emilita L. 1975. A Subcategorization of Tagalog Verbs. Quezon City: University of the Philippines (= The Archive Special Monograph No.2).
Wolff, John U. with Maria Theresa C. Centeno and Der-Hwa V. Rau. 1991. Pilipino through Self-Instruction. 4 vols. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program.
Kroeger, Paul R. 1993. Phrase Structure and Grammatical Relations in Tagalog. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Keenan, Edward L. 1976. ”Towards a Universal Definition of ‘Subject’”. In: Li (ed.) 305-333.
Foley, William A. & Robert D. Van Valin. 1984. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1983. Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge/Mass.: The MIT Press.

English, Leo J. 1986. Tagalog-English Dictionary. Manila: National Book Store.
Panganiban, José V. 1972. Diksyunario-Tesauro Pilipino-Ingles. Quezon City: Manlapaz Publishing Co.
Rubino, Carl R.G. 1998a. Tagalog Standard Dictionary. New York: Hippocrene Books.
Santos, Vito C. 1983. Pilipino-English Dictionary. 2nd revised edition. Metro Manila: National.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

C.B. Martin's Mind in Nature

I am reading a review of C.B. Martin's Mind in Nature (2008).

mind is just another
  • system of dispositional states

  • capable of complex,

    • spatially and temporally projective,

    • directed

    • regulative

    • adjustments and control (p. 111ff).

  • Martin holds that the same basic functions and properties (

    • positive and negative feedback,

    • feedforward,

    • use,

    • material of use,

    • correlativity of manifestation and disposition base,

    • representation and

    • content)

  • that are found in the non-mental, non-conscious and non-linguistic occur in the mental, conscious and linguistic as well (p. 115-116).


Tuesday, September 9, 2008

documentary linguistics

[to do: clean up my text, give it some proper footnotes from Quakenbush and Himmelmann at least, and republish on Linguistic Exploration.]

I guess it is fair to say that "descriptive linguistics" is accepted as a term distinct from theoretical and applied linguistics, although obviously there is a gradient. Perhaps we can refer to this as (overlapping) fields within the discipline, orthogonal to the usual division by level of representation: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. There are also the "border fields" which do not belong to the linguistics discipline exclusively, but bring in additional methods from neighboring disciplines, e.g. computational linguistics.

So perhaps we can think of documentary linguistics as that subfield of descriptive linguistics as the subfield of descriptive linguistics that borders on the distinct and applied discipline of information technology use (not computer science research, which is what computational linguists often do).

The target audience of a language engineering environment for linguistic exploration would be professional and non-professional practitioners of documentary linguistics. Non-professionals would include language teachers and students in general, which professionals would include participants in professionally managed projects (including language teachers doing graduate research in applied linguistics) whose background may be linguistic sciences, education, professional editing, creative writing, information technology or something else.

J. Stephen Quakenbush. SIL International and Endangered Austronesian Languages.

[Note 5: The concept of “language documentation” as the product of “documentary linguistics” is discussed further below. The primary distinctive of language “documenation” is its focus on primary data, collected, annotated, and made available as “a lasting multipurpose record of a language.” (cf Himmelmann 2006:1).]
Awareness of the importance of language documentation has been growing worldwide over the past couple of decades along with awareness and concern over language endangerment. Language documentation has to do with producing a lasting record of representative samples of that language. As traditionally practiced by SIL, and indeed by the whole Western linguistic enterprise, language documentation has focused on the production of resources for the linguist or academician more than on resources that directly benefit speakers of the language being documented. In the tradition of early twentieth century American linguists Sapir and Bloomfield, field linguists have gone out to produce grammatical descriptions and text collections which would be published by major universities and academic publishing companies in order to advance the understanding of their fellow linguists. [Note 23: Bloomfield’s 1917 Tagalog texts with grammatical analysis is still considered a classic of this sort.]
In summary, language data on which much linguistic analysis and description is based has rarely been published as such. This is as true of SIL-published data on Austronesian languages as much as it is true of material published by other field linguists on less commonly studied languages around the world. Where language data has been published, it has usually not been “primary data,” but rather “secondary data” that has been edited, systematized or regularized in some way.
The past decade has seen increasing interest in the documentation of representative primary data in a form that will be permanently accessible to speakers and researchers in an electronic environment.26 Indeed, a new sub-discipline of linguistics has appeared bearing the name of Documentary Linguistics. The web-site of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages credits Nikolaus Himmelmann as a catalyst for the development of this discipline, citing his 1998 paper entitled “Documentary and descriptive linguistics.” In it, Himmelmann (1998: 116) states that
"The aim of a language documentation is to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community... This... differs fundamentally from... language description [which] aims at the record of a language... as a system of abstract elements, constructions, and rules."
Himmelmann, Gippert and Mosel (2006: v) specify that documentary linguistics is concerned with the “methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language or one of its varieties.”
Selected references

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2006. Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? In Gippert, Himmelmann and Mosel, eds. Essentials of language documentation, 1-30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2002. Documentary and descriptive linguistics (full version). In Osamu Sakiyama and Fubito Endo, eds. Lectures on Endangered Languages: 5 (Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim, Kyoto, 2002)
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36.161-195.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P., Jost Gippert and Ulrike Mosel. 2006. Editor’s preface. In Gippert, Himmelmann and Mosel, eds. Essentials of language documentation, v-vii. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

List: researchers



Linguists, digital data


Austronesianists
Carl Rubino's list of linguists working on Philippine languages 
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. ANU and Rühr-U Bochum paper on tagalog zero anaphora (transtives)
J. Stephen Quakenbush. Agutaynen, SIL. Endangered AN
Starosta, Stanley. Austronesian ‘Focus’ as Derivation: Evidence from Nominalization. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS 3.2:427-479, 2002.   Formosan and Philippine examples, seamless morphology.



General Linguistics
Lauri Karttunen. Word Play. ACL Lifetime Achievement Award talk. 26 pp.
PARC, Stanford.
reviews two lines of research that lie at the opposite ends on the field: semantics and morphology. The semantic part deals with issues from the 1970s such as discourse referents, implicative verbs, presuppositions, and questions. The second part presents a brief history of the application of finite-state transducers to linguistic analysis starting with the advent of two-level morphology in the early 1980s and culminating in successful commercial applications in the 1990s. It offers some commentary on the relationship, or the lack thereof, between computational and paper-and-pencil linguistics. The final section returns to the semantic issues and their application to currently popular tasks such as textual inference and question answering.
Historical Linguistics


Departments

Payap U, home of WeSay software project with SIL

List: Proceedings



Web-Based Language Documentation and Description, Papers from the Workshop on


miscellaneous links

The Linguist List calls and conferences


Saturday, September 6, 2008

Incremental Sigmoid Bayesian Networks

[python obj model  time   01:09:10]

talk at Google Tech Talks
James Henderson, U Geneva

ISBN's provide a powerful method of feature induction

This talk reminds me that I have a lot to learn about statistical processing and machine learning.

new terms: 

marginalize 
... related to to summing over all data, which is avoided
fully factorized
... without any links
beam search
... look at 100 best options, with each new word
branching factor
... limits blow up

Has ability to pass features.

Simple Synchrony Networks (Henderson 2003) are claimed to be ä strictly feed-forward approximation equivalent to neural networks (presumably back prop).

The means in mean field approximation turn out to be equivalent to the activation value of an edge in the neural network. Using discrete (0-1) random variables.

Perhaps hidden variables and visible variables captures the intuition about structural and substructural (substratal? features implicit from lexicon) analysis.

Using models with vectors of typed features, rather than trying to induce a grammar on atomic symbols.

Software

SSN Statistical Parser: A broad coverage natural language syntactic parser. 
ISBN Dependency Parser: The statistical dependency parser described in [Titov and Henderson, IWPT 2007] and evaluated in [Titov and Henderson, EMNLP-CoNLL 2007]. 

I.Titov and J.Henderson. A Latent Variable Model for Generative Dependency Parsing. In Proc. International Conference on Parsing Technologies(IWPT 2007), Prague, Czech Republic, 2007.

I.Titov and J.Henderson. Fast and Robust Multilingual Dependency Parsing with a Generative Latent Variable Model. In Proc. Joint Conf. on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL 2007), Prague, Czech Republic, 2007. (CoNLL Shared Task, 3rd result out of 23)


James Henderson, Peter Lane
A Connectionist Architecture for Learning to Parse (1998)  (8 citations)
Dept of Computer Science, Univ of Exeter  PDF

Grammatical Frameworks

Reference sites

a general ConstructionGrammar site

Laura A. Michaelis pubs
Zwicky: "Dealing out meaning", on construction grammar (Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1994). Also local
Benjamin K. Bergen (UH Manoa) pubs

HPSG


Delphin. edited collection
 
Tibor Kiss Ruhr-U Bochum

some papers
  • Graham Wilcock. An OWL Ontology for HPSG. University of Helsinki. [integrated with an existing OWL ontology, GOLD, as a community of practice extension.]


Miscellaneous People

Arnold Zwicky the founder of the OUTIL (OUT In Linguistics) mailing list

video talks

01:17:25 From: UserGroupsatGoogle

01:00:58 From: googletechtalks

26:59 From: pycon08

Google Tech Talks February, 28 2008 
Added: 6 months ago
Views: 1,491
55:59

ABSTRACT

Treebank parsing can be seen as the search for an optimally refined grammar consistent with a coarse training treebank. We describe a method in which a minimal grammar is hierarchically refined using EM to give accurate, compact grammars. The resulting grammars are extremely compact compared to other high-performance parsers, yet the parser gives the best published accuracies on several languages, as well as the best generative parsing numbers in English. In addition, we give an associated coarse-to-fine inference scheme which vastly improves inference time with no loss in test set accuracy.

Slides: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~petrov/...

Speaker: Slav Petrov
Slav Petrov is a Ph.D. Candidate at University of California Berkeley Dept of Computer Science, where he is also a research assistant working with Dan Klein and Jitendra Malik on inducing latent structure for perception problems in vision and language. 



Google Tech Talks April, 17 2008 ABSTRACT Modeling human sentence-processing can help us (more)
Added: 4 months ago
Views: 7,892
49:35

xABSTRACT
Modeling human sentence-processing can help us both better understand how the brain processes language, and also help improve user interfaces. For example, our systems could compare different (computer-generated) sentences and produce ones that are easiest to understand.
Modeling human sentence-processing can help us both better understand how the brain processes language, and also help improve user interfaces. For example, our systems could compare different (computer-generated) sentences and produce ones that are easiest to understand.
Modeling human sentence-processing can help us both better understand how the brain processes language, and also help improve user interfaces. For example, our systems could compare different (computer-generated) sentences and produce ones that are easiest to understand.
I will talk about my work on evaluating theories about syntactic processing difficulty on a large eye-tracking corpus, and present a model of sentence processing which uses an incremental, fully connected parsing strategy.
Speaker: Vera Demberg
Vera Demberg is a Ph.D. student in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research focus is on building computational models of human sentence processing.
Vera obtained a Diplom (MSc) in Computational Linguistics from Stuttgart University, and a MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. She has published papers in a number of top venues for language processing and psycholinguistic research, including ACL, EACL, CogSci and Cognition.
For her PhD research, she's been awarded the AMLaP Young Scientist Award for best platform presentation by a junior scientist. She was a finalist for the Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2007.x

Short videos

08:52 From: lingosteve
02:20 From: lingosteve

Python

01:40:15  googletechtalks

01:06:41  From: googletechtalks

Cognitive Science

01:37:42 From: googletechtalks

Added: 8 months ago
Views: 9,573
01:02:13
ABSTRACT

Neurocomputational models provide fundamental insights towards
understanding the human brain circuits for learning new associations
and organizing our world into appropriate categories. In this talk I
will review the information-processing functions of four interacting
brain systems for learning and categorization:

(1) the basal ganglia which incrementally adjusts choice behaviors using environmental
feedback about the consequences of our actions,

(2) the hippocampus which supports learning in other brain regions through the creation of
new stimulus representations (and, hence, new similarity
relationships) that reflect important statistical regularities in the
environment,

(3) the medial septum which works in a feedback-loop with
the hippocampus, using novelty-detection to alter the rate at which
stimulus representations are updated through experience,

(4) the frontal lobes which provide for selective attention and executive
control of learning and memory.

The computational models to be described have been evaluated through a variety of empirical
methodoligies including human functional brain imaging, studies of
patients with localized brain damage due to injury or early-stage
neurodegenerative diseases, behavioral genetic studies of
naturally-occuring individual variability, as well as comparative
lesion and genetic studies with rodents. Our applications of these
models to engineering and computer science including automated anomaly
detection systems for mechanical fault diagnosis on US Navy
helicopters and submarines as well more recent contributions to the
DoD's DARPA program for Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures
(BICA).

Speaker: Dr. Mark Gluck
Mark Gluck is a Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers University - Newark, co-director of the Rutgers Memory Disorders Project, and publisher of the public health newsletter, Memory Loss and the Brain. He works at the interface between neuroscience, psychology, and computer science, where his research focuses on the neural bases of learning and memory, and the consequences of memory loss due to aging, trauma, and disease. He is the co-author of "Gateway to Memory: An Introduction to Neural Network Models of the Hippocampus and Memory " (MIT Press, 2001) and a forthcoming undergraduate textbook, "Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior." He has edited several other books and has published over 60 scientific journal articles. His awards include the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions from the American Psychological Society and the Young Investigator Award for Cognitive and Neural Sciences from the Office of Naval Research. In 1996, he was awarded a NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Bill Clinton. For more information,



Miscellaneous

Google Tech Talks January, 29 2008 ABSTRACT IPv6 and the DNS Speaker: Suzanne Woolf (more)

[TRANSLATED] jQuery
Google Tech Talks April, 3 2008 ABSTRACT jQuery is a JavaScript library that stand (more)
Added: 5 months ago
Views: 66,703
01:00:37
June 4, 2008


Google Tech Talks June 4, 2008 ABSTRACT In software engineering, aspects are concerns t (more)
Added: 3 months ago
Views: 2,535
3.5
40:12
ABSTRACT

In software engineering, aspects are concerns that cut across multiple modules. They can lead to the common problems of concern tangling and scattering: concern tangling is where software concerns are not represented independently of each other; concern scattering is where a software concern is represented in multiple remote places in a software artifact. Although aspect-oriented programming is relatively well understood, aspect-oriented modeling (i.e., the representation of aspects during requirements engineering, architecture, design) is still rather immature. Although a wide variety of approaches to aspect-oriented modeling have been suggested, there is, as yet, no common consensus on how aspect-oriented models should be captured, manipulated and reasoned about. This talk presents MATA (Modeling Aspects Using a Transformation Approach), which is a unified way of handling aspects for any well-defined modeling language. The talk will argue why MATA is necessary and highlight some of the key features of MATA. In particular, the talk will motivate the decision to base MATA on graph transformations and will describe an application of MATA to modeling security concerns.

Speaker: Jon Whittle
Prof. Jon Whittle joined Lancaster University in August 2007 as a Professor of Software Engineering. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, and, prior to that, he was a researcher and contractor technical area lead at NASA Ames Research Center. In July 2007, he was awarded a highly prestigious Wolfson Merit Award from the Royal Society in the UK. Jon's research interests are in model-driven software development, formal methods, secure software development, requirements engineering and domain-specific methods for software engineering. His research has been recognized by a number of Best Paper awards, including the IEE Software Premium prize (with João Araújo). He is Chair of the Steering
Committee of the International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering, Languages and Systems
and has been a program committee member of this conference since 2002 (including experience track PC chair in 2006). He has served on over 30 program committees for international conferences and workshops.
He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Software and Systems Modeling. Jon has also been a guest editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, the Journal of Software Quality, and has co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Software and Systems Modeling. 


browsed googletechtalks until 300 (WINE conf 2007)