The Logic Colloquium on Friday, April 26, 2:30pm in the Humanities Institute (Babbidge Libarary, 4th floor), will feature Adrian Brasoveanu (UC Santa Cruz).

Computational Cognitive Modeling for Syntax and Semantics

(joint work with Jakub Dotlačil)

Abstract: I introduce a typical experimental task in psycholinguistics — self-paced reading — and show how to build end-to-end simulations of a human participant in such an experiment; end-to-end means that we model visual and motor processes together with specifically linguistic processes (syntactic and semantic parsing) in a complete model of the experimental task. The model embeds theoretical hypotheses about linguistic representations and parsing processes in an independently motivated cognitive architecture (ACT-R). In turn, the resulting cognitive models can be embedded in Bayesian models to fit them to experimental data, estimate their parameters and perform quantitative model comparison for qualitative theories.

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