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Paper presented at the Workshop on Distributional Methods in Language Modelling, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, U.K.
Informing Connectionist Psycholinguistics through Corpus Analyses
Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
Connectionist psycholinguistics is an emerging approach to the
modeling of human language processing using artificial neural networks
(Christiansen & Chater, 2001b). Whereas early connectionist modeling
demonstrated that neural networks could in principle capture important
aspects of language, more recent work has moved towards capturing
detailed psycholinguistic data (Christiansen & Chater, 2001a). In this
talk, I outline three ways in which corpus analyses can be employed to
inform connectionist psycholinguistics. I first discuss how corpus
analyses can be used to improve the representativeness of the input
provided to connectionist models, using recent simulations of
syntactic acquisition via multiple-cue integration as an example
(Christiansen & Dale, 2001). I then consider how corpus analyses can
be employed as baseline models against which network performance can
be compared, pointing to syntactic processing comparisons between
N-gram models and neural networks as an example (Christiansen &
Chater, 1999; Christiansen & Dale, 2001). Finally, I argue that corpus
analyses can be used to further explore and substantiate network
predictions, providing an example from the modeling of multiple-cue
integration in infant speech segmentation (Christiansen et al., 1998)
along with corroborating infant data (Curtin et al., in preparation).
References
Christiansen, M.H., Allen, J. & Seidenberg, M.S. (1998). Learning to
segment speech using multiple cues: A connectionist model. Language
and Cognitive Processes, 13, 221-268.
Christiansen, M.H. & Chater, N. (1999). Toward a connectionist model
of recursion in human linguistic performance. Cognitive Science, 23,
157-205.
Christiansen, M.H. & Chater, N. (Eds.) (2001a). Connectionist
psycholinguistics. Westport, CT: Ablex.
Christiansen, M.H. & Chater, N. (2001b). Connectionist
psycholinguistics: Capturing the empirical data. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 5, 82-88.
Christiansen, M.H. & Dale, R.A.C. (2001). Integrating distributional,
prosodic and phonological information in a connectionist model of
language acquisition. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of
the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 220-225). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Curtin, S., Christiansen, M.H., Mintz, T.H., Byrd, D. & Werker,
J.F. (in preparation). Stress changes the representational landscape:
Evidence from word segmentation.
