模式识别学术大讲堂

Advanced Lecture Series in Pattern Recognition

题   目 (TITLE)：How grammars help humans and computers avoid surprises

讲座人 (SPEAKER)：Prof. Stephen Crain, Macquarie University

主持人 (CHAIR)：Prof. Jianhua Tao

时   间 (TIME)：10:00am, March 19 (Tuesday), 2019

地   点 (VENUE)：No.1 Conference Room (3rd floor), Intelligence Building

报告摘要（ABSTRACT）：

The goal of computational linguistics is to develop cognitively-plausible mechanisms that simulate the human sentence processing mechanisms, or parser. Here are two observations about the human parser. First, so-called ‘agrammatic’ aphasics with memory spans of 2-4 items are able to detect the unacceptability of certain ungrammatical sentences more than a dozen words long. However, these same patients fail to detect the unacceptability of much shorter sentences when they are followed by optional tag-endings (… did he?, … didn’t she?). Second, by age 4, children are nearly the equals of adults in judging the truth or falsity of sentences with multiple logical expressions like Every girl with a dog or a cat received a prize, but children as old as 5-6 fail to follow seemingly simple commands like Put the frog on the napkin into the box. This talk will attempt to reconcile these facts about human behaviour and recent developments in computational linguistics which demonstrate that hierarchically-based language models perform more like humans, in several important respects, as compared to language models that treat sentences as strings of words (n-grams, or LMs without an injection of syntax). The proposal is that, like human parsers, syntax-infused language models are able to comprehend sentences that do not catch them unaware, but are less able to deal with surprises.

报告人简介（BIOGRAPHY）：

Stephen Crain is Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD). The CCD is funded for 7 years from 2011, and investigates 5 areas of cognition: language, reading, belief formation, memory, and person perception. Stephen Crain is the Program Leader of the Language Program and also Director of the International Center of Child Language Health, in Beijing China. Stephen Crain is Visiting Professor at the Beijing Language and Culture University, China, and at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Japan.
His research is in three areas of the psychology of language: child language acquisition, adult language processing, and neurolinguistics. In the study of child language development, he has contributed to the empirical assessment of the theory of Universal Grammar. For the last decade, his research has focused on children’s acquisition of semantic knowledge, in particular young children’s knowledge of logical expressions. Much of this has been cross-linguistic research, with a particular focus on Mandarin Chinese.