Computational Linguistics: Computers and the Brain

1. Computational Linguistics: Computers and the Brain University of Maryland Yakov Kronrod Dan Parker Irene EletaRaul David Guerra Judith Klavans

2. Different Strokes

3. What’s the connection? • What do computers have to do with Language? • Holy Grain: Full Language Understanding • NLP vs. CL

4. Types of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing • Speech Recognition/Comprehension • Speech Production • Language Induction • Lexical Analysis • Semantic Analysis • Machine Translation • Language Modeling • Cognitive Processing Modeling

5. Computational Linguistics: Defined • Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. In general, computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, cognitive scientists, cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists, anthropologists and neuroscientists, among others.

6. Computational Linguistics: Defined • Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. In theory, natural-language processing is a very attractive method of human-computer interaction. NLP has significant overlap with the field of computational linguistics, and is often considered a sub-field of artificial intelligence. Research into modern statistical NLP algorithms requires an understanding of a number of disparate fields, including linguistics, computer science, and statistics.

7. Building Blocks: Words • Commonly seen as the basic building block of language(Letters? Sounds? Noises?) • Can express basic thoughts(ie: give, please, that, etc…) • Used to construct sentences • Used to convey associations and emotions • Placeholders for concepts and images

8. Words in the Brain • “Tip of the tongue” phenomena • So many to keep track of • How do we remember a word we want? • Needed to process a sentence

9. Digitizing the Word • Words can be used as “tokens” to compute many different things • Words can be used to keep track of associations and descriptions • Search and Learning using words in computers

10. 1 picture; 1000 words

11. But First… …A few words from our resident Linguist.

13. Words in the Mind

14. The Mental LEXICON Where are words stored?

15. Holds all of the words you know. • How many words are in our lexicon? The Mental Lexicon: ~60,000 words!

16. The lexicon is not just a bag of words…

17. But it’s also not a dictionary…

18. Because you know so many words, the brain needs to find words VERY quickly.

19. How might a word be accessed? Cane Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

20. How might a word be accessed? C___ Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

21. How might a word be accessed? C___ Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

22. How might a word be accessed? C___ Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

23. How might a word be accessed? CA__ Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

24. How might a word be accessed? CA__ Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

25. How might a word be accessed? CAN_ Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

26. How might a word be accessed? CAN_ Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

27. How might a word be accessed? CANE Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

28. How might a word be accessed? CANE Cane Cap Cookie Candle Dog

30. Image from http://www.psych.nyu.edu/pylkkanen/Neural_Bases/07_slides/11_LexAccess_Elect.pdf

31. Emotion: Celebrate death birthday negative Party Sorrow Cheer positive remorse joy

32. Words and Art Images

33. Traditionalmuseum search  Title: Portrait of a Family Playing Music

34. Innovative museum search Title: Portrait of a Family Playing Music Title: Girl at the Piano: recording sound Title: The Studio abstract colorful geometric musicians cello violin Social tags! music piano music

35. An image is worth a thousand words……in all languages (or how people from different cultures build the many meanings of an image)

36. Interpretations and emotions US Spain Two women Sewing Light and shadow Doves Crown of thorns Melancholy La Virgen Cosiendo Cristo Corona de espinas Luz y sombra tranquilidad

37. Cotton picking two girls African American slavery Racism Southern The South Civil war

38. Museum User Museum Expert I remember a boat … Boat Builders, set on the Gloucester, Massachusetts coast relates to a series of prints and drawings devoted to shipbuilding. Homer also used this image of the two boys in an engraving for the October 11, 1873 issue of Harper’s Weekly. ………..

39. <vessel,china,handle,dynasty,jade,stone> <vessel, boat, lake, marine, ocean, sails, schooner, ship ,water> <vessel,boat,ocean,overcast, paddle,river,sail,ship,water, vastness >

40. Looking Forward • Advances in Bridging the Linguistics – NLP gap • Directions of research for language processing • Better models for human language usage • Cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines

41. Thank You! • Questions • Comments • Discussion