Information, Structure Lang

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This seminar brings together two divergent perspectives on human language. On one hand, linguistics research seeks to describe the structures that underlie human communication systems, often using formal tools such as grammars and logics. On the other hand, research in computer science, in particular information theory, seeks to discover the optimal way to package and transmit information over a channel. This seminar will focus on the intersection between these two programs: To what extent are human languages optimized for efficient communication? Can structural features of human language, or human linguistic behaviors be analyzed using the toolkit developed for efficient information exchange? Topics covered will include the structure of the lexicon, the relationship between syntactic and statistical dependencies, pragmatic inferences, as well various language-processing phenomena. Students will gain experience reading and presenting research papers in this area, and implementing concepts from information theory in code.