Cognitive Science and Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Sardinia 2010

Language acquisition and Kolmogorov complexity: Why is language acquisition possible

author: Nick Chater, Department of Psychology, University College London
published: June 15, 2010, recorded: May 2010, views: 310

Slides

Slides
0:00	Language acquisition and Kolmogorov complexity: Why is language acquisition possible?
3:49	Colaborators
4:06	Overview
7:13	1. Brain adapted for language?
9:13	Could brain be adapted for language?
11:10	A language - specific faculty implies the brain is adapted for language, just as for vision - 1
12:32	A language - specific faculty implies the brain is adapted for language, just as for vision - 2
13:53	But perhaps language and tha language faculty co - evolved via the Baldwin effect
16:50	The Baldwin effect
19:17	The Baldwin effect in action
19:44	But co - evolution pequires genetic adaptation to a varying language
21:37	Same speed for language and genetic mutation rate
22:35	Languages changes twice as fast
22:43	Languages changes 10 times as fast
23:46	Genes cannot catch a linguistic "moving target"
23:56	Diverging human populations
24:38	Once populations are split, co - evolution will be specific to the local linguistic environment
26:58	Case 1: Laguage change is fast
27:48	Case 2: Language change is slow
28:32	Is language shaped by the brain?
28:47	Two problems of induction
31:00	So language emerges from interacting constraints ...
32:48	Language is optimised to these factors over generations
33:40	Learning language
34:36	3. What can be learned from positive data
38:30	The logical problem of language acquisition
40:21	Specifying an "ideal" learning set - up
41:44	Prediction by simplicity
43:27	Prediction is possible!
44:44	Logical problem of overgeneralization is solvable
47:53	Absence as implicit negative evidence
48:15	Extensions - 1
50:37	Extensions - 2
52:45	But abstract results are only a start
52:53	4. What can be learned from positive data: II. A recipe
53:01	Poverty of the stimulus: The recipe
55:24	Nativism vs. Empiricism, the debate
56:08	Easy example
58:10	Lexical alternations
59:15	Contractions
61:07	Preliminary results
62:39	Contractions
62:46	Preliminary results
64:01	Summary

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