Computational Cognitive Linguistics

The talk will describe an ongoing project (modestly named the Neural Theory of Language) that is attempting to model language behavior in a way that is both neurally plausible and computationally practical. The cornerstone of the effort is a formalism called Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG). I will describe the formalism, a robust semantic parser based on it, and a variety of applications of moderate scale. These include a system for understanding the (probabilistic and metaphorical) implications of news stories, and the first cognitively plausible model of how children learn grammar.

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