Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook University) is in town, and will give a talk on “Partial organisation in languages”. Full title and abstract below. Tuesday 20th, 11am, DSB 1.17.
Partial organization in languages: La langue est un système où la plupart se tien(nen)t
Grammarians and linguists for the last several millennia have assumed that languages are fully organized discrete systems, where all the pieces fit together. Certain aspects of at least some languages are not discrete and may be undetermined. Real and convincing cases of such subsystems in languages support the claim that at least some aspect of the structure of languages results from undirected cultural evolution and that languages are not entirely the product of either the language organ or socially driven communicative needs. This talk will center on analyses of morphological roots systems in a selection of languages and on the English comparative construction.
We’ll attempt to attempt to fit two things into the usual LEC slot: Keelin Murray has a 10 minute talk she’d like to get feedback on, then Justin Sulik will use the remaining time to talk about his PhD research on “Abductive inference and insight in the evolution of symbolic communication”. Usual time and place: Tuesday, 11am, DSB 1.17.
Vanessa and Rachael will present sketches of experiments they’d like to run, with a view to doing a bit of group brainstorming and helping them firm up their plans. All welcome as usual, but this will hopefully be a very informal and fluid meeting, probably with lots of shouting. Usual time and place: Tuesday, 11am, DSB 1.17.
Vanessa: I’m designing an experiment in response to two recent articles that coupled frequency-dependent copying models to US census data on baby names.
Rachael: creating artificial community membership to see if people exploit that knowledge (or not) in a communication task
Catriona Silvey will be talking about her plans for the next stage of her PhD research: “The communicative origin of structured meanings: an experimental paradigm for testing the shareability hypothesis”, Tuesday 23rd October, 11am, DSB 1.17.
LEC meeting Monday 15th October: talk by Caroline Heycock and Joel Wallenberg
By Kenny | October 11, 2012
Note unusual day, time, venue.
Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh) and Joel Wallenberg (Newcastle) will present their joint work on “Acquisition, Ambiguity and Diachronic change: a case study from Germanic syntax”. Monday 15th December, 4pm, 7 Bristo Square, Lecture Theatre 3.
Bart de Boer (http://ai.vub.ac.be/members/bart) is in town and will give a talk on “Is unbiased learning possible?”, abstract below. Wednesday 10th October, 11am, Medical School, Doorway 4, Room G.16 (that’s approximately here: http://www.ed.ac.uk/maps/buildings/medical-school).
“Is unbiased learning possible?”
In the literature on Bayesian iterated learning, two different methods of going from a sample of observations to a production strategy are used: Maximum a-posteriori (MAP) learning and probability matching. This talk presents a mathematical argument that shows that both are impossible. The argument is based on a proof (by counterexample) that it is impossible to have an unbiased estimator of the mode (highest peak) of a continuous distribution. The impossibility of MAP learning and probability matching follows directly from this.
I will make an effort to present the mathematical argument in as accessible a way as possible. I will also discuss the implications of this finding, and argue that it makes the experimental search for (language specific?) learning biases more interesting.
Talk by Sean Roberts, “The ability to learn two languages evolved before the ability to learn one”. Tuesday 9th October, 11am, DSB 1.17.