The Role of Experience in Language Processing
Supported by NSF
Period: 1998-2000
The ability to speak and understand language is probably the most intricate skill that people possess. It is certainly our most uniquely human ability. This project investigates how such an important skill is acquired and continues to develop throughout our lives. The resulting research findings will have applications in three areas: (1) the design of computer systems that can recognize and produce language, (2) the teaching of language skills, including reading, writing, and foreign language learning, and (3) the remediation of language disorders such as aphasia and dyslexia.
The skills of language production and comprehension together comprise the language processing system, a complex system within the brain that turns thoughts into grammatical sequences of words and then articulates those words, and also understands the speech of others. The central claim of this project is that the language processing system is constantly changing. It adapts quickly to recent experience, while continuing
Relevant Publications:
- Y. Even-Zohar and D. Roth, A Sequential Model for Multi Class Classification. Proc. of the Conference on Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (2001) pp. 10-19 (abstract) [bibitem]
- C. Cumby, Learning family relationships via propositional means. (2001) [bibitem]
- E. Kim-Sang, W. Daelemans, H. Dejean, R. Koeling, Y. Krymolowski, V. Punyakanok, and D. Roth, Applying System Combination to Base Noun Phrase Identification. COLING-ACL, The 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (2000) pp. 857--863 (abstract) [bibitem]
- Y. Even-Zohar and D. Roth, A classification approach to word prediction. Proc. of the Annual Meeting of the North American Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL) (2000) pp. 124-131 (abstract) [bibitem]
- C. Cumby and D. Roth, Relational Representations that facilitate learning. Proc. of the International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (2000) pp. 425--434 (abstract) [bibitem]
- D. Roth, Learning in Natural Language: Theory and Algorithmic Approaches. Proc. of the Annual Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) (2000) pp. 1--6 (abstract) [bibitem]
- D. Roth, Learning in Natural Language. Proc. of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (1999) pp. 898--904 (abstract) [bibitem]
- M. Munoz, V. Punyakanok, D. Roth, and D. Zimak, A Learning Approach to Shallow Parsing. EMNLP-VLC, the Joint SIGDAT Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora (1999) pp. 168--178 (abstract) [bibitem]
- R. Khardon, D. Roth, and L. Valiant, Relational Learning for NLP using Linear Threshold Elements. Proc. of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (1999) pp. 911--917 (abstract) [bibitem]
- A. Golding and D. Roth, A Winnow based approach to Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction. Machine Learning (1999) pp. 107--130 (abstract) [bibitem]
- Y. Even-Zohar, D. Roth, and D. Zelenko, Word Clustering via Classification. BISFAI99 (1999) (abstract) [bibitem]
- D. Roth and D. Zelenko, Part of Speech Tagging Using a Network of Linear Separators. COLING-ACL, The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (1998) pp. 1136--1142 (abstract) [bibitem]
- D. Roth, Learning to Resolve Natural Language Ambiguities: A Unified Approach. Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (1998) pp. 806--813 (abstract) [bibitem]
- Y. Krymolowski and D. Roth, Incorporating Knowledge in Natural Language Learning: A Case Study. COLING-ACL workshop on the Usage of WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems (1998) pp. 121--127 (abstract) [bibitem]
