LINGUIST 794B: Learnability Theory and Syntax

Fall 2007
Herter 106, Th 2.30-5.15

Rajesh Bhatt, Tom Roeper
email: {bhatt,roeper}@linguist.umass.edu
{224, 218} South College, {7-0797, 5-6834}


Syllabus

Themes: This course will provide an introduction to Learnability Theory and attempt to connect the results from Learnability Theory with theoretical and empirical work on Language Acquisition. The course will proceed along two lines. We will devote the first half of each class to a discussion of the connections between learnability theory and language acquisition. The second half will initially be devoted to a straight introduction to learnability theory and later to statistical approaches to learning.

Lectures

• [1, Sep 6]: Formalizing Learning
  Reading: Chs. 1-3 of Systems that learn
  
  
• [2, Sep 13]: Bootstrapping and Epistemological Priority
  Readings: Excerpts from Pinker (1984) (1 and 2); Gleitman et al. (2005).
  
  
• [3, Sep 20]: Poverty of Stimulus
  Readings: Pullum & Scholz (2002a), Legate & Yang (2002), and Scholz & Pullum (2006)
  Additional Readings: Crain & Pietroski (2002), Fodor & Crowther(2002), Lasnik & Uriagareka (2002), Pullum & Scholz(2002b)
  Follow Up Reading: Pereira (2000): Formal Grammar and Information Theory: Together Again?
  Gold's Theorem and its implications (Lecture by Chris Potts)
  Readings: Gold (1967), Johnson (2004) , and Ch. 3 of Systems that learn
  
  
• [4, Sep 27]: Poverty of Stimulus (Contd.)
  Readings: Fodor & Crowther(2002)
  Convergence and Gradual Learning (Lecture by Joe Pater, presenting joint work with Paul Boersma)
  Readings: Boersma & Pater (2002) ( also secs. 2.2, 2.3 and 6 of Pater, Bhatt & Potts (2007) and Pater (2006))
  
  
• [5, Oct 4]: Subset Principle (Freeman lecture at 4.00pm, Half Class)
  Readings: Berwick (1985):275-297 (1 and 2), Musolino (2006)
  
  
• [6, Oct 11]: Competing Grammars
  Readings: Ch. 2 of Yang (2002), Roeper (1999) (also see Roeper (2005))
  
  
• [7, Oct 12]: Lecture by Charles Yang
  Readings: Yang (2004), Gambell and Yang (2005), Yang (2007)
  
  
• [8, Oct 18]: Subset Principle: Learning Generalization
  Readings: Tenenbaum and Griffiths (2001), Pearl and Lidz (2007)
  
  
• [9, Oct 25]: Discussion of projects (Roeper out of town)
  
  
• [10, Nov 1]: Grammatical Conservatism
  Readings: Chs. 4 and 8 of Snyder (2007)
  
  
• [11, Nov 8]: Lecture by William Snyder on Grammatical Conservatism
  
  
• [12, Nov 15]: The Role of Frequency (Bhatt out of town)
  Readings: Roeper (2007), and some responses to it: Demuth (2007), Westergard and Bentzen (2007), and Yang (2007)
  
  Topics to cover: Bayesian Learning and the Subset Principle (Tenenbaum, Lidz and Pearl), Distributional Learning (Collins Parser etc.)
• [13, Nov 29]: Bayesian Learning
• [14, Dec 6]: Distributional Learning
• [15, Dec 13]: Presentations