A small workshop on computational aspects of phonology is held at the University of Groningen (RUG), the Netherlands, on December 8, 2006. The workshop is open to anyone, but we kindly ask you to register not later than December 4. Should you have any question, please feel free to contact Tamás Bíró at birot @ nytud.hu
Harmony Building, H13.309 (Multimediazaal)
Oude Kijk in't Jatstraat 26, 9712 EK Groningen.
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|Chair: Dicky Gilbers|
|9:30||Opening: John Nerbonne|
|9:40||Tamas Biro (ACLC, Universiteit van Amsterdam):|
|Simulated Annealing for Optimality Theory: A performance model for phonology|
Similarly to other fields in linguistics in the last forty years, phonological models have focused on linguistic competence, whereas performance has not been considered as belonging to the realm of linguistics. The traditional Chomskyan dichotomy between competence and performance has, however, been questioned in the last decade by an increasing number of scholars. Certain performance phenomena, such as variation, conditional corpus frequencies and gradient grammaticality judgments, have been shown in many cases to be related to factors that unquestionably belong to linguistics. Models accounting for these phenomena have led to an ongoing discussion on whether and how to draw the borderline between competence and performance, or between the realm of linguistics and extra-linguistic factors.
|10:20||Bart Cramer and John Nerbonne (CLCG, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen):|
|Scaling Minimal Generalization|
In this study, we model the phonotactics using minimal generalization, a stochastic rule-based system proposed by Albright and Hayes (2003), who used this system successfully on learning the past tense in English. Their system generates rules that try to generalize over the phonetic features of the input (in our case, the CELEX database). These rules are hypotheses which might prove wrong in other parts of the input; hence they are 'stochastic'. This algorithm maintains the explicitness of rule-based systems, but adds an element of stochastic comparison. The results from Albright and Hayes also suggest that the model captures some aspects of cognitive representation faithfully.
Chair: Petra Hendriks
|11:30||Gerhard Jäger (Universität Bielefeld):|
|Exemplar dynamics and George Price's General Theory of Selection|
In a paper from the early seventies -- that was only published posthumously in 1995 -- the mathematical geneticist George Price laid out the foundations for a program that he called "a general theory of selection". His aim was a mathematical framework which can serve to describe all kinds of evolutionary processes, from gene selection in biology to political processes in human societies. The evolution of grammars was explicitly mentioned as one of the potential applications.
|12:10||Paul Boersma (ACLC, Universiteit van Amsterdam):|
|The emergence of markedness|
In a parallel Optimality-Theoretic model with multiple levels (phonetic form, phonological form, underlying form), the gradual acquisition of comprehension leads automatically to a ranking of faithfulness constraints in comprehension according to cue reliability and frequency of occurrence. If the speaker uses the same faithfulness constraint ranking in production, this leads to a correlation between phonological activity on the one hand and cue reliability and frequency on the other. Markedness, therefore, emerges as a result of an acquisition bias. Phonological theory therefore needs neither innate markedness hierarchies, nor synchronically functionalist (i.e. teleological) principles.
Chair: Gosse Bouma
|14:30||Adam Albright (MIT, Cambridge, MA):|
|Modeling gradient phonotactic well-formedness as grammatical competence|
A commonly stated goal of phonological analysis is to explain what speakers know that lets them agree that some non-occurring strings are possible words, while others are not (Halle 1962). Whenever one gathers judgments about novel words, however, a challenge arises: words fall along a gradient scale of acceptability: *bnick, *dlip < ?bwip < blick. Often, analysts impose a threshold, and formulate a grammar generating anything above the cut-off; further distinctions are assumed to reflect extra-grammatical factors like frequency, analogy, etc. In this talk, I defend the position that gradience is best modeled within the grammar itself. I consider three dimensions along which models may differ: (1) the structure used to encode generalizations, (2) the way frequency influences generalization, and (3) access to prior markedness biases. I present computational models that differ along these dimensions, and report attempts to model experimental acceptability judgments. The results so far indicate that a successful model must refer to sequences of natural classes, rather than raw perceptual similarity. Furthermore, the strength of a pattern is found to correlate with type frequency, not token frequency, contrary to what one would expect if gradience arose "on-line" during lexical access. Finally, preferences can be observed that have no apparent basis in the lexicon. Taken together, these facts suggest that gradience is indeed encoded within a learned grammar, composed partly of lexical generalizations and partly of phonetic markedness biases.
|15:30||Closing and coffee|
If you intend to participate in the workshop, please register before December 4, 2006 in order to facilitate organisation.
Information Science/Humanities Computing
Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG)
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RUG)
From Wilbert Heeringa's page:
A list of hotels in Groningen (please note that the prices are outdated).
Thanks to Gerlof Bouma for the design.