CLS Talk by Afra Alishahi, Today 2pm, F2.19

[Ekaterina Shutova]

Hi everyone, 

I am really very sorry for advertising this so late! Today, we'll have a talk by a great speaker in the CLS Seminar. Afra Alishahi from the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication will talk about modelling human language acquisition based on visually grounded speech. Her research comprises many topics that are under research at ILLC such as linguistic structure, cognitively plausible language modelling and situated language. I hope many of you can make it. Please notice the unusual time and date: 

Today (!), 2pm, F2.19, SP107

I hope to see many of you there. 

Lisa

Speaker: 

Afra Alishahi, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication

Title 

Getting closer to reality: Grounding and interaction in models of human language acquisition

Abstract

Humans learn to understand speech from weak and noisy supervision: they manage to extract structure and meaning from speech by simply being exposed to utterances situated and grounded in their daily sensory experience. Emulating this remarkable skill has been the goal of numerous studies; however researchers have often used severely simplified settings where either the language input or the extralinguistic sensory input, or both, are small-scale and symbolically represented. I present a series of studies on modelling visually grounded language understanding. Using variations of recurrent neural networks to model the temporal nature of spoken language, we examine how form and meaning-based linguistic knowledge emerges from the input signal.