Plan for the April 9 (11 am-12 pm) meeting: go through the next chapter of the “Learn you a Haskell” textbook, namely Syntax in Functions. The GHCI script will be available on eCommons before the meeting. See you then.

Our first spring-quarter meeting (April 2, 11 am) will be dedicated to a basic intro to Haskell and a brief preview of how it can be used to implement formal semantics theories.

The best way to get Haskell up and running on your computer is to install the Haskell Platform …

LaLoCo will meet regularly during the spring 2013 quarter, basically every Tuesday 11 am-12 pm in the Meeting & Analysis room (Stevenson 217).

The main topic will be a tutorial on how to implement formal semantics theories in functional languages, Haskell in particular (but OCaml-based implementations, for example, should be …

1. Basic Probability Theory (I)
2. Basic Probability Theory (II)
3. Bayesian Inference (I)
4. Bayesian Inference (II)
5. Beta-Bernoulli updates (scripts available on eCommons)
6. statistical modeling in general and Bayesian modeling in particular: recap; introduction to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and the Metropolis-Hastings family of algorithms (scripts available on eCommons)
7. the mean model …

Fall 2012 graduate seminar (Ling 239, UCSC): Introduction to Bayesian Data Analysis & Cognitive Modeling. See the syllabus for more information.

There will be an R tutorial on Thur June 14, 1 pm in the Cave. Please feel free to bring your laptops (it’s actually recommended). In preparation for the tutorial, please download and install R from here (or some other mirror):

http://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/

and ALSO please …

We introduced Gaussian mixtures today and discussed how to estimate their parameters with R & JAGS for finite mixtures and the R package “DPpackage” for infinite (Dirichlet Process) mixtures. As we mentioned in our concluding discussion today, there is a very wide range of possible linguistic applications for this kind of …

On April 26, Jakub Dotlacil presented recent and ongoing work with Adrian Brasoveanu on the semantics and processing of distributivity, reporting the results of 3 eye-tracking experiments that investigated:

1. whether distributive vs. collective readings for plural definites are a matter of ambiguity or vagueness (building on previous work by Frazier …

John Kruschke made a couple of changes to the hierarchical Bayesian ANOVA scripts in his “Doing Bayesian Data Analysis” book. An important one is changing the hyperprior on the SD parameter. Here’s a lightly edited quote:

The previous version (see p. 496) had the folded-t prior recommended by Gelman …

The R & JAGS scripts we used today to discuss ch. 12 “The SIMPLE Model of Memory” and ch. 11 “Signal Detection Theory” of Lee & Wagenmakers (“Bayesian Cognitive Modeling: A Practical Course”, to appear) are available here: ch-12-LW.r and ch-11-LW.r. As we mentioned during the meeting, these …