KACL Lecture Series

 
#18 : Peter W. Culicover
Professor, Ohio State University
 
Title: Adventures with CAMiLLe, a Computational Minimalist Language Learner
 
Date : September 9, 2002, 16:00--18:00
Place : Room 1411, ground floor of Bldg 14, Kobe Shoin Women's University.

I report on the results of ongoing language learning experiments with CAMiLLe. CAMiLLe is a computational implementation of a conservative, attentive, minimalist language learner. CAMiLLe has only a very minimal prior knowledge of grammar, forms correspondence rules between sound and meaning, takes account of every bit of linguistic data, and generalizes very conservatively. After a brief description of the architecture of CAMiLLe, I describe how well CAMiLLe performs on a number of grammatical acquisition tasks, such as word order and syntactic correspondences with thematic roles. The tentative conclusion at this point is that CAMiLLe is capable of acquiring a system that is equivalent to the grammar of a human language, although it lacks much of the formal machinery of contemporary grammatical theories.

 


 
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