10e séminaire au Doctorat en informatique cognitive 

Marcos LOPES – 26 novembre 2020 (ce séminaire sera en français)

(LIEN ZOOM - https://uqam.zoom.us/j/96780028011 )     

Titre : Grounding dictionary meaning

Résumé :

Language acquisition is a long-term dynamic process which comprises not only learning language sounds, words and phrase structures, but also grounding those linguistic entities in perception, feeling, and reasoning.

We know for a fact that throughout this process babies are incapable of passively repeating ready-made expressions heard from adults' mouths, as they are constantly adapting their communication skills according to the available knowledge and linguistic capabilities.

But how exactly is this done? Focusing on lexical meaning acquisition, we assume that the whole process is based on two key operations: (1) grounding words of a basic vocabulary set and (2) enhancing this vocabulary later on combinatorially by learning new words through verbal definitions composed of already grounded words. This correlates with the way dictionaries are made: a small set of words can recursively generate the whole of the largest, most exhaustive dictionary. From this point of view, dictionaries of any language, of any complexity can be described as acyclic oriented graphs. We aim to show that word acquisition by children reveals precisely those same structures. 

Bio :

Marcos Lopes is Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of São Paulo, Brazil. He did his doctoral work in Linguistics at University of Paris X (Nanterre). His research subjects focus on mapping natural language semantics into knowledge representation theories in Artificial Intelligence.