Key objectives
- Creating a computational model of phonetic, phonological and morphological production, comprehension, acquisition and historical development.
- The model should entertain multiple levels of representation, probably closer to 20 than to 5.
- The model should be bidirectional, i.e. the same connections should handle production as well as comprehension.
- In the model, phonological and morphological entities should be emergent rather than innately given.
- Once the model works for phonology and morphology, it can generalize to syntax and semantics, thereby providing a new perspective on language as a whole.
Events
- The DeepFon people can join the BiPhon meeting, every other Friday at 14:00 or 15:00. This meeting is open to other phoneticians and phonologists, as well as to other ACLC and ILLC members interested in computational language emergence.
- ACLC seminars (and the like) in 2021 and 2022:
On the day before Klaas Seinhorst’s PhD defence, we organized a meeting at the ACLC, called Workshop on learnability and typology (February 18, 2021), featuring the following four talks: - Paul Boersma (ACLC), in collaboration with Kateřina Chládková (Charles U. Prague) and Titia Benders (Macquarie U., Sydney): Phonological features emerge substance-freely from the phonetics and the morphology.
- Janet Pierrehumbert (University of Oxford): On iterated learning and lexical contrastiveness.
- Jakub Szymanik (ILLC): Why are natural language quantifiers monotone?
- Steven Moran (University of Neuchâtel): Evolution of speech sounds.
Members
Paul Boersma (coordinator); Titia Benders; Dirk Jan Vet (engineer); Marianne de Heer Kloots; Charlotte Pouw and various thesis and tutorial students, both BA and MA.