SPHS colloquium: Mike Jones, April 12

Please join us for a colloquium presented by the SPHS PhD Organization and the Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences!

 

The ‘Other’ Dimension of Words

by Mike Jones, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Indiana University
Dept of Psychological and Brain Sciences,

Cognitive Science Program, &

School of Informatics

 

Location: Speech and Hearing Building, Room C141

Time: Friday, April 12, 11 am - noon

 

ABSTRACT

Meaning is simultaneously the most obvious feature of language (we can all compute it rapidly and automatically), and the most mysterious aspect to study. In comparison to many areas of cognition, relatively little is known about how the mind computes meaning from experience. We can reasonably measure and model the characteristics of words based on their physical properties, such as frequency, orthography, phonology, etc. But lexical semantics is often seen as a mysterious ‘other’ dimension and is approximated with subjective ratings, hand-coded norms, or surface-level count algorithms. In this talk, I plan to do a tutorial on some recent advances in cognitive and statistical models of lexical semantic representation. These models attempt to learn rich semantic representations for words from statistical redundancies in text corpora. Time permitting, I will also cover some recent work on integrating perceptual and linguistic information in semantic models, compositional semantics, and some work from my lab applying the models to better understand cognitive processing in linguistic tasks from clinical populations.