Zaproszenie na seminarium "Formal means of describing natural language learning"

W czwartek  9.05  o godz. 10.00 w auli 1.15 w nowym skrzydle Instytutu Informatyki odbędzie się ciekawe seminarium "Formal means of describing natural language learning". Prelegentem będzie Profesor Menno van Zaanena z North-West University w RPA. Serdecznie zapraszamy wszystkich pracowników i studentów Wydziału!

Abstrakt: The languages we speak as humans are not random sequences of symbols, but are bound by certain rules. Linguistics has for a long time investigated these rules and since approximately the 1940s more formal approaches have been proposed. In this presentation, I will provide a few example formalisms to describe natural language syntax (i.e., sentence structure). These formalisms have known mathematical properties. At the same time, linguistics informs us that these formalisms do not allow us to describe all phenomena occurring in natural languages. Making the formalisms more complex increases their descriptive power, but at the same time makes them computationally more complex (meaning that deciding whether a sentence is syntactically correct will take more effort). If we now take a look at the efficient learnability of these formalisms, which in a way aims to mimic how people learn their languages, we see that even the most simple formalisms cannot be learned efficiently. Obviously, this is in contrast with how people learn a language. I will mention a few ways of trying to resolve this issue by looking at properties of the language formalisms as well as the description of the learning process.