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SUMMARY:How language understanding unfolds in minds and machines - Roger L
 evy (MIT)
DTSTART:20211112T120000Z
DTEND:20211112T130000Z
UID:TALK165265@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Georgi Karadzhov
DESCRIPTION:Language allows us to package our thoughts into symbolic forms
  and transmit some approximation of them into each other's minds. We do th
 is hundreds of times a day as listeners\, speakers\, readers\, and writers
 . How we're able to achieve this is one of the great scientific questions 
 in the study of mind and brain. In this talk I describe two of our researc
 h group's recent theoretical and empirical advances in our work on this qu
 estion. First\, we evaluate and calibrate contemporary deep-learning model
 s for human-like processing using numerous controlled experimental benchma
 rks and human behavioral datasets.  Our results shed light on classic ques
 tions of the learnability of syntactic structures from linguistic input\, 
 and also highlight the continued importance of model architecture for huma
 n-like linguistic generalization. Second\, we offer new results from a the
 ory of how memory constrains human understanding: namely\, that context re
 presentations are "lossy" in an information-theoretic sense. This theory n
 ovelly links memory representations for grammatical structures to the stat
 istics of the natural language environment\, explaining recent results sho
 wing how the same grammatical configuration can differ in difficulty for n
 ative speakers of different languages. The theory also predicts new genera
 lizations about word order that we empirically confirm in multiple languag
 es.\n\n\nJoining instructions:\nGeorgi Karadzhov is inviting you to a sche
 duled Zoom meeting.\n\nTopic: NLP Seminar 12.11.2021\nTime: Nov 12\, 2021 
 12:00 PM London\n\nJoin Zoom Meeting\nhttps://cl-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/99738
 977979?pwd=cTJWd3JmZHJpd21QRWU5ZnNPemlOQT09\n\nMeeting ID: 997 3897 7979\n
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 am-ac-uk.zoom.us/u/ac8u5e5toO\n\n
LOCATION:Virtual (Zoom)
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