Winter 2014: Meeting 3

The third meeting this quarter took place on Fri Jan. 31. We discussed garden-path phenomena based on ch. 4 of Hale’s ms. and the general view of parsing (and other language-related cognitive processes, e.g., learning) as heuristic-based search through an appropriate state space. We discussed (greedy) best-first and A* search, optimality of A* search and the notion of admissible heuristic for A*. Ch. 3 of Russell & Norvig’s AI textbook provides an excellent introduction to search-based problem solving, and it is freely available here.

We will continue next time (Feb. 7, same time and place) with an introduction to cognitive architectures (SOAR and ACT-R) for linguists (ch. 5 of the Hale ms. and other sources, to be discussed then).