About the program: Probabilistic methods have revolutionized computational linguistics in the last fifteen years. In this talk, I describe how probabilistic methods are illuminating our understanding of human language processing as well. The talk covers two fundamental issues, one each in language comprehension and production: what determines the difficulty of comprehending a given word in a given sentence, and what factors influence the choice that a speaker makes when it is possible to express a meaning more than one way? The first half of the talk covers models and experimental results in syntactic processing that show how probabilistic expectations can be a stronger determinant of comprehension difficulty than more traditional measures of difficulty based on memory load. The idea that probabilistic expectations drive processing difficulty leads to the proposal of the second half of the talk: that speakers make choices in language production such that their utterances tend toward an optimal, uniform level of information density. The second half of the talk covers an empirical study and model of uniform information density based on a naturally occurring corpus of telephone conversations.
About the Speaker:
Roger Levy received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 2005 from
Time/Place: Wednesday
June 13, 6:00 P.M. Lockheed Martin, 4770 Eastgate
Mall
Reservations/Information: Andrew Diamond (IEEE CIS San Diego
Chapter Chair) (858) 509-3115, adiamond@EnvisionSystemsLLC.com