| Semester: | Fall 2012 (Aug 22-Dec 4) |
|---|---|
| Meeting time: | Tuesday/Thursday, 3:55-5:10 |
| Room: | Pomerene 206 |
| Instructor: | Micha Elsner (melsner@ling.osu.edu) |
| Office hours: | TBA or by appointment |
As shown by experiments, infants are sensitive to the statistical regularities of the world around them and can learn to recognize patterns in the stimuli they are exposed to. This has led to a variety of computational models of early language learning based on statistical inference. These models inform us about the kinds of evidence and cognitive biases necessary to learn particular linguistic generalizations. Some of these models are also intended to suggest particular mechanisms of infant learning or explain observed developmental trajectories.
This course is intended to provide an introduction to the computational tools and research methods used to model language acquisition. The course will assume a basic knowledge of linguistics; detailed knowledge of developmental linguistics will be very helpful but not necessary. However, we will not cover non-computational work on developmental linguistics in any detail. We will also assume an understanding of basic probability. There will be two introductory lectures covering standard machine learning techniques for unsupervised learning intended to make the course more accessible to students who are comfortable with mathematical techniques but have not worked extensively with machine learning before. (Students who are not sure of the prerequisites or want to take this course alongside comp ling or psych ling 1 should see the instructor beforehand.)
The course will be divided into two sections. In the first, we will take a brief tour of the literature on statistical acquisition, covering phonetics, the lexicon, morphophonology and syntax. In the second, students will propose a short research project of their choice involving experimenting with a statistical model of acquisition. In each section, students will present one or more papers to the class (how many depends on class size); after the project proposals, the students will choose papers to present which are related to their projects.
Students will be required to post a question on each reading to Carmen the day before class; these questions will be organized and raised in discussion by the leader for that day.
Grades will be based 40% on presentations, 40% on projects and 20% on short paper reviews for each presented paper.
Course overview (this is the first class, so no reading, although students who haven't might look at Saffran "Statistical language learning: Mechanisms and constraints" Current Directions in Psychological Science 2003):
30 August Bayesian methods (optional reading Navarro, Griffiths, Steyvers and Lee "Modeling individual differences using Dirichlet Processes" Journal of Mathematical Psych 2006)
30 August Please email me the list of three or four papers you would like to present.
3 September First due date for paper comments on Carmen!
4 September McMurray, Aslin and Toscano "Statistical learning of phonetic categories: insights from a computational approach" DevSci 2009 Marten van Schijndel
6 September Feldman, Griffiths and Morgan "Learning phonetic categories by learning a lexicon" CogSci 2009 Marten
11 September Christiansen, Onnis and Hockema "The secret is in the sound: from unsegmented speech to lexical categories" DevSci 2009 Evan Jaffe
13 September Goldwater, Griffiths and Johnson "A Bayesian framework for word segmentation: Exploring the effects of context" Cognition 2009 David Howcroft
18 September Jones, Johnson and Frank "Learning words and their meanings from unsegmented child-directed speech" NAACL 2010 Micha Elsner
20 September Peperkamp, Le Calvez, Nadal, and Dupoux "The acquisition of allophonic rules: statistical learning with linguistic constraints" Cognition 2006 AND Martin, Peperkamp and Dupoux "Learning phonemes with a proto-lexicon" CogSci 2012 (page proofs on Carmen) Abby Walker, if she wants, or else Evan
25 September Wilson and Hayes "Maximum entropy phonotactics" Linguistic Inquiry 2008 (up to section 6) Jennifer Zhang
25 September Your project proposal is due in two weeks! Start thinking/talking to me about papers you want to read in the second half of the course.
27 September Perfors, Regier and Tenenbaum "Poverty of the stimulus? A rational approach" CogSci 2006 Evan
2 October Klein and Manning "Corpus-based induction of syntactic structure: models of dependency and constituency" ACL 2004 Marten
4 October Bannard, Lieven and Tomasello "Modeling children's early grammatical knowledge" PNAS 2009 Micha
9 October Your written project proposal (about 1 page) is due before class today, as is your list of paper suggestions for the second half of the class. Since not too many people seem to be officially taking the class, audits and vagabonds may also make paper suggestions, which will be considered after those from enrolled students.
Proposed projects: Mental state verbs, filler-gap dependencies.
11 October Barak, Fazly and Stevenson "Modeling acquisition of mental state verbs" CMCL 2012
18 October Alishahi and Stevenson "A computational model of early argument structure acquisition" CogSci 2008
23 October Continue discussion of Alishahi
1 November Connor, Gertner, Fisher and Roth "Baby SRL: Modeling early language acquisition" CONLL 2008
20 November Titov and Klementiev "A Bayesian Approach to Unsupervised Semantic Role Labeling" EACL 2012
25 November Class canceled
27 November Continue discussion of Titov
12 December at 12pm in the linguistics lab!
This is a seminar, so go ahead and discuss the papers and your projects outside of class; however, please write the questions you post to Carmen yourself. If you want to collaborate on a project, please see me; otherwise, your project writeup is expected to be your own work, although you are encouraged to use software, datasets and articles written by others, as long as you give credit where due using citations. See the COAM site http://oaa.osu.edu/coam.html
Any student who feels they may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me privately to discuss their specific needs, and contact the Office for Disability Services at 614-292-3307 in room 150 Pomerene Hall to coordinate reasonable accommodations.