Language, Cognition, and Computational Models

by Thierry Poibeau, Aline Villavicencio

Overview

How do infants learn a language? Why and how do languages evolve? How do we understand a sentence? This book explores these questions using recent computational models that shed new light on issues related to language and cognition. The chapters in this collection propose original analyses of specific problems and develop computational models that have been tested and evaluated on real data. Featuring contributions from a diverse group of experts, this interdisciplinary book bridges the gap between natural language processing and cognitive sciences. It is divided into three sections, focusing respectively on models of neural and cognitive processing, data driven methods, and social issues in language evolution. This book will be useful to any researcher and advanced student interested in the analysis of the links between the brain and the language faculty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107162228
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/25/2018
Series:	Studies in Natural Language Processing
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Thierry Poibeau is Director of Research at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris and head of the LaTTiCE laboratory in Paris, France. His is also an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (DTAL) of the University of Cambridge. He works on natural language processing (NLP), in particular focusing on information extraction, question answering, semantic zoning, knowledge acquisition from text, and named entity tagging.

Aline Villavicencio is a Reader at the Institute of Informatics, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and is a fellow of CNPq (Brazil). Her research interests in natural language processing are in computational models of acquisition of linguistic information from data, distributional semantic models, multiword expression, and applications like text simplification and question answering.

Table of Contents

Part I. About This Book: 1. Introduction T. Poibeau and A. Villavicencio; Part II. Models of Neural and Cognitive Processing: 2. Light-and-deep parsing P. Blache; 3. Decoding language from brain B. Murphy, A. Fyshe and L. Wehbe; 4. Graph theory applied to speech N. B. Mota, M. Copelli and S. Ribeiro; Part III. Data-Driven Models: 5. Putting linguistics back into computational linguistics M. Kay; 6. A distributional model of verb-specific semantic roles inferences G. E. Lebani and A. Lenci; 7. Native language identification on EFCAMDAT X. Jiang, Y. Huang, Y. Guo, J. Geertzen, T. Alexopoulou, L. Sun, A. Korhonen; 8. Evaluating language acquisition models L. Pearl and L. Phillips; Part IV. Social and Language Evolution: 9. Social evolution of public languages A. Reboul; 10. Genetic biases in language R. Janssen and D. Dediu; 11. Transparency versus processing efficiency R. van Trijp.

Editorial Reviews

'The deepest questions about language will be solved through cooperation across disciplinary boundaries. Insights from neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and social science only offer partial explanations. Computer modeling provides an ideal methodology to integrate these diverse insights and put them to the test on real data. This broad collection of papers from leading research groups, contextualised by Thierry Poibeau and Aline Villavicencio, will inspire everyone interested in the cognitive aspects of language processing.' Walter Daelemans, Universiteit Antwerpen

'Although Natural Language Processing could be considered an area of Cognitive Science, the two fields have tended to go their own way as they matured. Yet the interaction between the two areas can be fruitful. Poibeau and Villavicencio have to be credited for playing an important role in keeping the connection between the two fields alive. The well-chosen and insightful papers in this book provide a great illustration of how the interaction between the two fields can lead to progress in a number of areas from language acquisition to parsing to the diagnosis of cognitive deficits, to the new area of using language models to gain insights about how the brain encodes semantics, and vice versa.' Massimo Poesio, Queen Mary University of London

'This volume brings a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to its subjects … All of the essays present new and emerging research in neuroscience and language. While the materials covered are advanced for most undergraduates, this volume would make a valuable resource for researchers in the field and a helpful guide to graduate students on subjects for further research. An excellent addition to collections where natural language processing and cognitive science are studied. Summing Up: Recommended.' R. Bharath, Choice

From the Publisher