Join Us: Dr. Rambelli on Analogy and Linguistic Productivity (11/19 Wed.)

[Min-Chun Hsiao]

Hi everyone,

The SynSem group at CU Boulder is happy to have a special Syntax-Semantics session with Dr. Giulia Rambelli, speaking live from Bologna on Wednesday, November 19, from 10:00 to 11:30 AM (Mountain Time, Denver).

We will host an in-person watch party in LBB 151 with bagels and coffee, and you are warmly welcome to join us there or attend via Zoom. We are also delighted to have Prof. Lei Yuan (Psychology and Neuroscience) joining us in person as our discussant.

Please see the details below:

• Title: 
  • Analogy in Language Processing: A Constructionist and Computational Approach to Productivity
• Abstract:
  • Understanding the mechanisms that people use to go beyond their known input to produce novel, structured utterances–that is, to achieve linguistic productivity, is a crucial domain in linguistics. This talk will explore how novel meaning is constructed by relying on patterns of use rather than by fixed compositional rules. Within a constructionist framework, analogy is seen as the cognitive process that allows speakers to extend existing constructions to novel contexts, balancing creativity and conventionality. I will discuss insights from my recent work on the interpretation of novel noun–noun compounds in both humans and large language models, shedding light on the parallels and divergences in their processing strategies. The results will serve as a basis for a broader discussion of analogy as a cognitive mechanism underlying linguistic productivity, addressing two crucial challenges: 1) define specific tasks to investigate whether analogy plays a role in human comprehension, and 2) use Language Models as tools to investigate how the exposure to item-specific structures guide the interpretation of novel linguistic ones.
• Bio:
  • Dr. Giulia Rambelli holds a joint PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Pisa (Italy) and Aix-Marseille University (France). She has been a Postdoctoral Researcher on the European ERC project ABSTRACTION at the University of Bologna and will join the Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain (Aix-Marseille University) in January to carry on her own project “ANALOGIZE- Modeling Analogical Generalization in Children’s Creative Compound Formation through Computational Models.” Her research sits at the intersection of theoretical linguistics, cognitive science, and computational models of language, with a focus on the mechanisms underlying sentence interpretation and linguistic productivity from a usage-based perspective. In her Cambridge Element “Constructions and Compositionality: Cognitive and Computational Explorations”, she examines the balance between compositional and direct access to meaning, exploring how the cognitive process of analogy can be modeled as a source of linguistic productivity. 
  • Dr. Rambelli’s work has been published in main *CL conferences and received international recognitions, including the Baidu AACL-IJCNLP Best Paper Award (2020), the Best Paper Award at *SEM (2021), and the Outstanding Paper Award at MWE (2023). She is also a co-organizer of the international workshops Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) and The Workshop on Analogical Abstraction in Cognition, Perception, and Language (Analogy-Angle II).

Best,

Allen