Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition

Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition
Author: Aline Villavicencio
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642318630

Questions related to language acquisition have been of interest for many centuries, as children seem to acquire a sophisticated capacity for processing language with apparent ease, in the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. However, with recent advances in technology and cognitive-related research it is now possible to conduct large-scale computational investigations of these issues The book discusses some of the latest theoretical and practical developments in the areas involved, including computational models for language tasks, tools and resources that help to approximate the linguistic environment available to children during acquisition, and discussions of challenging aspects of language that children have to master. This is a much-needed collection that provides a cross-section of recent multidisciplinary research on the computational modeling of language acquisition. It is targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of computational techniques for understanding language acquisition. Readers of this book will be introduced to some of the latest approaches to these tasks including: * Models of acquisition of various types of linguistic information (from words to syntax and semantics) and their relevance to research on human language acquisition * Analysis of linguistic and contextual factors that influence acquisition * Resources and tools for investigating these tasks Each chapter is presented in a self-contained manner, providing a detailed description of the relevant aspects related to research on language acquisition, and includes illustrations and tables to complement these in-depth discussions. Though there are no formal prerequisites, some familiarity with the basic concepts of human and computational language acquisition is beneficial.

Multiword Expressions Acquisition

Multiword Expressions Acquisition
Author: Carlos Ramisch
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2014-09-24
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319092073

​This book is an excellent introduction to multiword expressions. It provides a unique, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of this exciting topic in computational linguistics. The first part describes the diversity and richness of multiword expressions, including many examples in several languages. These constructions are not only complex and arbitrary, but also much more frequent than one would guess, making them a real nightmare for natural language processing applications. The second part introduces a new generic framework for automatic acquisition of multiword expressions from texts. Furthermore, it describes the accompanying free software tool, the mwetoolkit, which comes in handy when looking for expressions in texts (regardless of the language). Evaluation is greatly emphasized, underlining the fact that results depend on parameters like corpus size, language, MWE type, etc. The last part contains solid experimental results and evaluates the mwetoolkit, demonstrating its usefulness for computer-assisted lexicography and machine translation. This is the first book to cover the whole pipeline of multiword expression acquisition in a single volume. It is addresses the needs of students and researchers in computational and theoretical linguistics, cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence and computer science. Its good balance between computational and linguistic views make it the perfect starting point for anyone interested in multiword expressions, language and text processing in general.

Approaching Language Transfer through Text Classification

Approaching Language Transfer through Text Classification
Author: Scott Jarvis
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2012-03-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1847697003

Recent work has pointed to the need for a detection-based approach to transfer capable of discovering elusive crosslinguistic effects through the use of human judges and computer classifiers that can learn to predict learners’ language backgrounds based on their patterns of language use. This book addresses that need. It details the nature of the detection-based approach, discusses how this approach fits into the overall scope of transfer research, and discusses the few previous studies that have laid the groundwork for this approach. The core of the book consists of five empirical studies that use computer classifiers to detect the native-language affiliations of texts written by foreign language learners of English. The results highlight combinations of language features that are the most reliable predictors of learners’ language backgrounds.

Languages: From Formal to Natural

Languages: From Formal to Natural
Author: Orna Grumberg
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2009-05-12
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 3642017479

This Festschrift volume, published in honor of Nissim Francez on the occasion of his 65th birthday, contains 15 papers, written by friends and colleagues, many of whom congregated at a celebratory symposium held on May 2009, in Haifa, Israel.

TRUST IN ROBOTS

TRUST IN ROBOTS
Author: Sabine T. Koeszegi
Publisher: TU Wien Academic Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3854480520

Robots are increasingly becoming prevalent in our daily lives within our living or working spaces. We hope that robots will take up tedious, mundane or dirty chores and make our lives more comfortable, easy and enjoyable by providing companionship and care. However, robots may pose a threat to human privacy, safety and autonomy; therefore, it is necessary to have constant control over the developing technology to ensure the benevolent intentions and safety of autonomous systems. Building trust in (autonomous) robotic systems is thus necessary. The title of this book highlights this challenge: “Trust in robots—Trusting robots”. Herein, various notions and research areas associated with robots are unified. The theme “Trust in robots” addresses the development of technology that is trustworthy for users; “Trusting robots” focuses on building a trusting relationship with robots, furthering previous research. These themes and topics are at the core of the PhD program “Trust Robots” at TU Wien, Austria.

Language, Cognition, and Computational Models

Language, Cognition, and Computational Models
Author: Thierry Poibeau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2018-01-25
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 110850678X

How do infants learn a language? Why and how do languages evolve? How do we understand a sentence? This book explores these questions using recent computational models that shed new light on issues related to language and cognition. The chapters in this collection propose original analyses of specific problems and develop computational models that have been tested and evaluated on real data. Featuring contributions from a diverse group of experts, this interdisciplinary book bridges the gap between natural language processing and cognitive sciences. It is divided into three sections, focusing respectively on models of neural and cognitive processing, data driven methods, and social issues in language evolution. This book will be useful to any researcher and advanced student interested in the analysis of the links between the brain and the language faculty.

Adaptive Languages

Adaptive Languages
Author: Christian Bentz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2018-06-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110560100

Languages carry information. To fulfil this purpose, they employ a multitude of coding strategies. This book explores a core property of linguistic coding – called lexical diversity. Parallel text corpora of overall more than 1800 texts written in more than 1200 languages are the basis for computational analyses. Different measures of lexical diversity are discussed and tested, and Shannon’s measure of uncertainty – the entropy – is chosen to assess differences in the distributions of words. To further explain this variation, a range of descriptive, explanatory, and grouping factors are considered in a series of statistical models. The first category includes writing systems, word-formation patterns, registers and styles. The second category includes population size, non-native speaker proportions and language status. Grouping factors further elicit whether the results extrapolate across – or are limited to – specific language families and areas. This account marries information-theoretic methods with a complex systems framework, illustrating how languages adapt to the varying needs of their users. It sheds light on the puzzling diversity of human languages in a quantitative, data driven and reproducible manner.

Multiword expressions

Multiword expressions
Author: Manfred Sailer
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2018
Genre: Bilingualism
ISBN: 3961100632

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar.

Empiricism and Language Learnability

Empiricism and Language Learnability
Author: Nick Chater
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2015-07-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0191053589

This interdisciplinary new work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. The authors, from different backgrounds—-linguistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology and cognitive science-explore the idea that language acquisition proceeds through general purpose learning mechanisms, an approach that is broadly empiricist both methodologically and psychologically. For many years, the empiricist approach has been taken to be unfeasible on practical and theoretical grounds. In the book, the authors present a variety of precisely specified mathematical and computational results that show that empiricist approaches can form a viable solution to the problem of language acquisition. It assumes limited technical background and explains the fundamental principles of probability, grammatical description and learning theory in an accessible and non-technical way. Different chapters address the problem of language acquisition using different assumptions: looking at the methodology of linguistic analysis using simplicity based criteria, using computational experiments on real corpora, using theoretical analysis using probabilistic learning theory, and looking at the computational problems involved in learning richly structured grammars. Written by four researchers in the full range of relevant fields: linguistics (John Goldsmith), psychology (Nick Chater), computer science (Alex Clark), and cognitive science (Amy Perfors), the book sheds light on the central problems of learnability and language, and traces their implications for key questions of theoretical linguistics and the study of language acquisition.

Cognitively Inspired Natural Language Processing

Cognitively Inspired Natural Language Processing
Author: Abhijit Mishra
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2018-08-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9811315167

This book shows ways of augmenting the capabilities of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems by means of cognitive-mode language processing. The authors employ eye-tracking technology to record and analyze shallow cognitive information in the form of gaze patterns of readers/annotators who perform language processing tasks. The insights gained from such measures are subsequently translated into systems that help us (1) assess the actual cognitive load in text annotation, with resulting increase in human text-annotation efficiency, and (2) extract cognitive features that, when added to traditional features, can improve the accuracy of text classifiers. In sum, the authors’ work successfully demonstrates that cognitive information gleaned from human eye-movement data can benefit modern NLP. Currently available Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are weak AI systems: they seek to capture the functionality of human language processing, without worrying about how this processing is realized in human beings’ hardware. In other words, these systems are oblivious to the actual cognitive processes involved in human language processing. This ignorance, however, is NOT bliss! The accuracy figures of all non-toy NLP systems saturate beyond a certain point, making it abundantly clear that “something different should be done.”