The Unsupervised Learning of Natural Language Structure自然语言结构的无监督学习.pptVIP

Learning Language from Distributional Evidence Christopher Manning Depts of CS and Linguistics Stanford University Workshop on Where Does Syntax Come From?, MIT, Oct 2007 There’s a lot to agree on![C. D. Yang. 2004. UG, statistics or both? Trends in CogSci 8(10)] Both endowment (priors/biases) and learning from experience contribute to language acquisition “To be effective, a learning algorithm … must have an appropriate representation of the relevant … data.” Languages, and hence models of language, have intricate structure, which must be modeled. More points of agreement Learning language structure requires priors or biases, to work at all, but especially at speed Yang is “in favor of probabilistic learning mechanisms that may well be domain-general” I am too. Probabilistic methods (and especially Bayesian prior + likelihood methods) are perfect for this! Probabilistic models can achieve and explain: gradual learning and robustness in acquisition non-homogeneous grammars of individuals gradual language change over time [and also other stuff, like online processing] The disagreements are important, but two levels down In his discussion of Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1998), Yang contrasts “statistical learning” (of syllable bigram transition probabilities) from use of UG principles such as one primary stress per word. I would place both parts in the same probabilistic model Stress is a cue for word learning, just as syllable transition probabilities are a cue (and it’s very subtle in speech!!!) Probability theory is an effective means of combining multiple, often noisy, sources of information with prior beliefs Yang keeps probabilities outside of the grammar, by suggesting that the child maintains a probability distribution over a collection of competing grammars I would place the probabilities inside the grammar It is more economical, explanatory, and effective. The central questions What representations are appropriate for human languages? What biases are re