Reminder: Seminars Friday 27/1 (SLC) and Wednesday 1/2 (CLS)

[Zuidema, Jelle]

*Reminders*

Dear all,

As announced, we'll have an SLC tomorrow and our first CLS in a while next week. Details below; for the CLS this now includes the room (A1.04) and an abstract.

Best
Jelle

***

CLS, 1 February 2012, 4pm, room A1.04.

Speaker: Christer Samuelsson

Title: Parametric Distributions for Statistical Machine Translation: What do Alignment Probabilities Actually Look Like?

Abstract:

The alignment and sentence length probabilities statistical machine translation have numerical domains and could potentially be modeled by parametric distributions. It turns out that sentence length probabilities are well-described by automatically fitted Gaussian distributions, and alignment probabilities by reflected--crammed into a finite sentence---Cauchy distributions.

This indicates that there is less signal in them than commonly thought. From a practical perspective, parametric distributions are much more compact and robust. The extracted distribution parameters lent themselves very well to linear regression, compressing the entire set of distributions to just two regression parameters each. This is much more effective data pooling than smoothing over neighboring contexts.

***

SLC-4, 27 January 2011

16h-17h30, room C3.108, Science Park 904

Theme: Recursion across cognitive domains

16h00-16h30 Talk by Katja Abramova (MSc Brain & Cognitive Science), "Recursive Processing across Domains"
16h30-17h30 Discussion / reading group

Papers:
Patel, A.D. (2012). Language, music, and the brain: A resource-sharing framework.  In: P. Rebuschat, M. Rohrmeier, J. Hawkins, & I.  Cross (Eds.), Language and Music as
Cognitive Systems (pp. 204-223). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/patel/Patel_2012_LMCS_chapter.pdf

Scheepers, C., Sturt, P., Martin, C., Myachykov, A., Teevan, K., and Viskupova, I. (in press) Structural priming across cognitive domains: From simple arithmetic to relative clause attachment. To appear in Psychological Science
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/08/26/0956797611416997

(This is the work presented by Sturt at the workshop following Gideon's PhD defense)

(BTW: this meeting follows the independent event of the Music Group with a talk by Michiel Schuijer on Pitch-Class Set Theory and the Notion of Distance in Music at 2pm).