This week, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld (University of Washington) will give a colloquium talk and two-part minicourse as the first invited speaker of the Breakstone Speaker Series on Language, Mind, and Computation. This brand new speaker series is an interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty from MIT Linguistics, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and MIT CSAIL. The funding for the series comes in the form of a donation by Micha Breakstone (PhD, Hebrew University of Jerusalem).
Abstracts and details about Shane’s visit can be found below.
Colloquium: Unnatural Language Semantics
When: March 17, 3.30-5pm
Where: 32-141
Abstract: Unnatural language semantics is the study of the meaning of words and expressions in languages that are very unlike natural languages. In this talk, I will present several case studies about how unnatural language semantics can inform us about the structure of natural languages. In particular, I will explain and present several case studies of two methods for explaining semantic universals (shared properties of meaning across the languages of the world). One method argues that, at the individual word level, such universals arise due to learnability. The other method suggests that, at the language level, they arise due to optimally trading-off the competing pressures of simplicity and informativeness. The talk will conclude with some discussion about the connections between the two approaches as well as other applications where unnatural language semantics can be helpful.
Mini-course: The Artificial Language Toolkit
When: March 15, 3-5pm; March 16, 12.30-2pm
Where: 32-D461
Abstract: This session will introduce the technique of analyzing semantic typology from the perspective of efficient communication, capturing the idea that natural languages optimally balance competing pressures to be simple and to be informative. After introducing the general framework, we will look at one application in detail: indefinite pronouns. In particular, we will walk through reproducing this paper in a new software library that we are developing called the Artificial Language Toolkit, which enables linguists and other researchers to provide typological data in easy-to-produce formats and then conducts various efficient communication analyses more-or-less automatically.Paper on indefinite pronouns: http://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13142
Artificial Language Toolkit (ALTK; still in active development): https://clmbr.shane.st/altk/