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From Natyural to Nacheruhl: Utterance Selection and Language Change
Most of us should know by now that language changes. It’s why the 14th Century prose of Geoffrey Chaucer is nearly impenetrable to modern day speakers of English. It is also why Benjamin Franklin’s...
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Top-down vs bottom-up approaches to cognition: Griffiths vs McClelland
There is a battle about to commence. A battle in the world of cognitive modelling. Or at least a bit of a skirmish. Two articles to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences debate the merits of...
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Dialects in Tweets
A recent study published in the proceedings of the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference (EMNLP) in October and presented in the LSA conference last week found evidence of...
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Animal Signalling Theory 101: Handicap, Index… or even a signal? The Case of...
The differences between handicaps and indices are usually distinguishable in formal mathematical models or in unambiguous real-world cases. Often though, classifying a trait as a handicap, an index,...
View ArticleStatistics and Symbols in Mimicking the Mind
MIT recently held a symposium on the current status of AI, which apparently has seen precious little progress in recent decades. The discussion, it seems, ground down to a squabble over the prevalence...
View ArticleCognitivism and the Critic 2: Symbol Processing
It has long been obvious to me that the so-called cognitive revolution is what happened when computation – both the idea and the digital technology – hit the human sciences. But I’ve seen little...
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A spin glass model of cultural consensus
Does your social network determine your rational rationality? When trying to co-ordinate with a number of other people on a cultural feature, the locally rational thing to do is to go with the...
View ArticleWhy evolutionary linguists shouldn’t study languages
How many languages do you speak? This is actually a difficult question, because there’s no such thing as a language, as I argue in this video. This is a video of a talk I gave as part of the Edinburgh...
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Tea Leaves and Lingua Francas: Why the future is not easy to predict
We all take comfort in our ability to project into the future. Be it through arbitrary patterns in Spring Pouchong tea leaves, or making statistical inferences about the likelihood that it will rain...
View ArticleAdvances in Visual Methods for Linguistics (AVML2012)
Some peeps over the the University of York are organising a conference on the advances in visual methods for linguistics (AVML) to take place in September next year. This might be of interest to...
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