John Hale (Cornell) will be giving a colloquium talk next Friday, September 18th titled "What a rational parser would do". The talk will be in the linguistics building at 10 Washington Place, 1st floor. A reception will be held afterwords right upstairs on the 2nd floor.
Abstract:
If we conceptualize a theory of human sentence comprehension as a combination of
(1) a grammar (2) a strategy for using the rules of the grammar and (3) some architectural facilities like memory we still have a huge space of possible theories. It would be nice to narrow this class down to just those that somehow made sense in relation to the communicative function sentence-comprehension often serves.
This talk examines a smaller class of comprehension theories that strive to finish parsing as soon as possible. These theories would be "rational" on a view of the comprehender as doing his or her best to understand what the speaker means.
I shall argue that they correctly derive well-known garden pathing phenomena along with the puzzling Local Coherence effects studied by Tabor, Galantuccia and Richardson (2004). Time permitting, I will discuss the relationship between this
class of theories and the Entropy Reduction Hypothesis revived in Hale (2006).
Tabor, W., Galantuccia, B., & Richardson, D. (2004). Effects of merely local syntactic coherence on sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language , 50 (4), 355-370.
Hale, J. (2006). Uncertainty about the rest of the sentence. Cognitive Science , 30 (4), 609-642.