Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Invited talk 2/27 - Shota Momma (UC San Diego)

Speaker: Shota Momma (UC San Diego)
Title: Aligning parsing and generation
Time: Tuesday, February 27th, 1:00-2:30pm 
Place: 32-D461
Abstract:

We use our grammatical knowledge in at least two ways. On one hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to say what we want to convey to others. On the other hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to understand what others say. In either case, we need to assemble sentence structures in a systematic fashion, in accordance with the grammar of our language. Despite the fact that the structures that comprehenders and speakers assemble are systematic in an identical fashion, the cognitive systems that assemble the mental representation of sentence structures in comprehension and production might or might not be the same. The potential existence of two independent systems of structure building doubles the problem of linking the theory of linguistic knowledge and the theory of linguistic performance, making the integration of linguistics and psycholinguistic harder. In this talk, I will discuss whether it is possible to design a single system that builds mental representations of sentence structures in comprehension, i.e., parsing and in production, i.e., generation. I will discuss existing and new experimental data pertaining to how sentence structures are assembled in real-time comprehension and production, and attempt to show that the unification between parsing and generation is possible.