Winter 2014: Meeting 2

The second meeting this quarter took place on Fri Jan. 24. We looked at some NLTK parsing demos, namely recursive descent (top-down, depth-first), bottom-up and left-corner parsers.

Nate discussed left-corner parsing in detail and the empirical evidence that favors left-corner parsers as models of the human parser / processor over purely top-down or purely bottom-up parsers.

The handouts we used will be posted here very soon and constantly updated throughout the quarter.

We will continue next time (i.e., Fri Jan. 31, same time and place) with a discussion of garden path phenomena and possibly a basic introduction to cognitive architectures (SOAR and ACT-R) — basically chapters 4 and 5 of the Hale draft.