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Seminar of Interest: Kaufmann & Shapiro, “Plurals”

Stefan Kaufmann (Linguistics) and Stewart Shapiro (Philosophy) will be co-teaching a seminar on “Plurals” this semester. A draft syllabus is attached to this message. It is very preliminary, but will at least give you a rough idea of the topics to be covered. You can register to take the seminar for credit under either of its numbers (LING 6410 or PHIL 5342). Auditing is also an option. Please direct any questions you might have to either of the instructors.

Talk of interest on 04/26: Adrian Brasoveanu (UCSC)

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.