Séminaire - Ezer Rasin

Ezer Rasin, jeune professeur très prometteur de l'Université de Tel Aviv, interviendra dans le cadre du séminaire de linguistique, le vendredi 12 novembre à 12h30, via Zoom (https://unil.zoom.us/j/5457981042). 

Dans sa recherche, Ezer associe linguistique et méthodes computationnelles pour comprendre comment les enfants parviennent à relever le défi d'apprendre le système de leur langue (phonologie, morphologie, syntaxe, sémantique, etc.). Il parlera plus spécifiquement d'apprentissage des systèmes de sons, comme décrit dans le résumé ci-dessous. 

En cas d'intérêt, vous êtes toutes et tous convié·e·s à y assister !

> Page web du séminaire pour plus d'infos : https://bstorme.com/lausanne-linguistics-research-seminar.html

How children learn the hidden sound patterns of their language: a computational approach

The sound system of a language contains patterns that humans learn from their input in the first few years of their lives. Some of those patterns are "hidden" (also called "opaque"), in the sense that they are only observable at a level of abstraction that is remote from the surface sounds that children hear. Such hidden sound patterns pose a cognitive puzzle: how do children make the inductive leap required to abstract away from the surface and discover a hidden sound pattern? In this talk I will present an approach to this puzzle based on the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL) -- a mathematical formalization of Occam's Razor -- according to which children learn sound patterns by looking for the system of rules that provides the simplest description of their input. I will present a concrete MDL-based learning algorithm and successful simulation results using artificial datasets with hidden sound patterns like those found in natural languages. These results suggest that MDL is a promising general theory of language acquisition in the domain of sound.