CompLang is a student-run discussion group on language and computation. The aim of the group is to bring together the language community at MIT and nearby, learn about each other's research, and foster cross-laboratory collaborations. The broad topic of the meetings is using computational models to study scientific questions about language. We will discuss work from computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, natural language processing and formal linguistics. This week’s talk is from Reuben Harry Cohn-Gordon (Stanford University).

Speaker: Reuben Harry Cohn-Gordon (Stanford University)

Title: Bayesian Pragmatic Models for Natural Language

Date and time: Thursday, 10/18, 5-6pm

Location: 46-5165

Abstract: The Rational Speech Acts model (RSA) formalizes Gricean reasoning through nested models of speakers and listeners. While this paradigm offers an elegant way to simulate pragmatic behaviour in NLP tasks such as image captioning and translation, scaling from simple models to natural language presents several challenges. In particular, I discuss the problem of choosing alternative utterances among an unbounded set of sentences, including work on image captioning and on-going work on translation.