Winter 2014: Plan

The first LaLoCo meeting this quarter will take place on Fri Jan. 17 — not this coming Fri, but the next one. Regular time: Fridays, 2:15-3:15 pm. Place: Meeting & Analysis room (Stevenson 217).

Karl, Nate and I will do a series of lab meetings about parsing this quarter. The first 2 meetings or so will be dedicated to reading the draft of a textbook by John Hale that is closely related to his 2011 paper (available here; search for the published version from an on-campus computer to access it).

The title of the textbook is “Automaton theories of human sentence comprehension”. Here’s an excerpt from the preface about its motivation and goals:

I published an article in 2011 which I hoped would encourage more interest in causal, algorithmic models of human sentence comprehension. But this article was relatively long and inscrutable. It included citations which presupposed familiarity with books like Newell and Simon (1972) and Anderson (1990). Not many linguists are equipped with this background.

However, I think that this kind of work is very important for linguistics as our field shakes off its self-imposed isolation. We must view ourselves as cognitive scientists of language, and discover the implications that our theories hold for things outside of the structural system of language.

To that end, I have tried to write a book that is more accessible to the linguistics community than that article was. Since 2011 my own perspective has matured as well: I realized that I had been spending a lot of time programming facilities that are present in many of the most well-known cognitive architectures. I started to see the foundational role that cognitive architecture will have to play in justifying linguistics as a valuable subfield of cognitive science.

Printed copies of the textbook will be made available for the people that will attend.