Abstract
This paper describes a framework for studies of the adaptive acquisition and evolution of language, with the following components: language learning begins by associating words with cognitively salient representations (“grounding”); the sentences of each language are determined by properties of lexical items, and so only these need to be transmitted by learning; the learnable languages allow multiple agreements, multiple crossing agreements, and reduplication, as mildly context sensitive and human languages do; infinitely many different languages are learnable; many of the learnable languages include infinitely many sentences; in each language, inferential processes can be defined over succinct representations of the derivations themselves; the languages can be extended by innovative responses to communicative demands. Preliminary analytic results and a robotic implementation are described.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Angluin, D.: Inference of reversible languages. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 29, 741–765 (1982)
Brody, M.: Lexico-Logical Form: A Radically Minimalist Theory. MIT Press, Cambridge (1995)
Chomsky, N.: Three models for the description of language. IRE Transactions on Information Theory IT-2, 113–124 (1956)
Chomsky, N.: The Minimalist Program. MIT Press, Cambridge (1995)
Frey, W., Gärtner, H.-M.: On the treatment of scrambling and adjunction in minimalist grammars. In: Formal Grammar 2000 (2002)
Kanazawa, M.: Learnable Classes of Categorial Grammmars. CSLI Publications/FOLLI, Stanford, California (1998)
Kirby, S.: Learning, bottlenecks, and the evolution of recursive syntax. In: Briscoe, E.J. (ed.) Linguistic Evolution Through Language Acquisition: Formal and Computational Models. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1999)
Kobele, G.M.: Formalizing mirror theory. Grammars 5, 177–221 (2002)
Kobele, G.M., Collier, T., Taylor, C., Stabler, E.: Learning mirror theory. In: 6th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Frameworks (2002)
Kobele, G.M., Riggle, J., Collier, T., Lee, Y., Lin, Y., Yao, Y., Taylor, C., Stabler, E.: Grounding as learning. In: Language Evolution and Computation Workshop, ESSLLI 2003 (2003)
Michaelis, J.: Derivational minimalism is mildly context-sensitive. In: Moortgat, M. (ed.) LACL 1998. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2014, p. 179. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Michaelis, J.: On Formal Properties of Minimalist Grammars. Ph.D. thesis, Universität Potsdam. Linguistics in Potsdam 13 (2001)
Niyogi, S.: A minimalist implementation of verb subcategorization. In: Seventh International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, IWPT 2001 (2001)
Niyogi, S.: Bayesian learning at the syntax-semantics interface. In: Procs., 24th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 697–702 (2002)
Retoré, C., Bonato, R.: Learning rigid Lambek grammars and minimalist grammars from structured sentences. In: Popelínský, L., Nepil, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the Third Learning Language in Logic Workshop, LLL3, pp. 23–34 (2001)
Siskind, J.M.: A computational study of cross-situational techniques for learning word-to-meaning mappings. Cognition 61, 39–91 (1996)
Stabler, E.P.: Structures for learning. In: CoLogNet Lecture, ESSLLI 2002, Trento (2002) (publication forthcoming)
Stabler, E.P., Keenan, E.L.: Structural similarity. Theoretical Computer Science 293, 345–363 (2003)
Steels, L.: Synthesizing the origins of language and meaning using coevolution, self-organisation and level formation. In: Hurford, J., Knight, C., Studdert-Kennedy, M. (eds.) Evolution of Human Language, pp. 161–165. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh (1996)
Vogt, P.: Lexicon grounding on mobile robots. Ph.D. thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Laboratorium voor Artificiële Intelligentie (2000)
Wee, K., Collier, T., Kobele, G., Stabler, E.P., Taylor, C.: Natural language interface to an intrusion detection system. In: International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems, ICASE 2001 (2001)
Weir, D.: Characterizing mildly context-sensitive grammar formalisms. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1988)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Stabler, E.P. et al. (2003). The Learning and Emergence of Mildly Context Sensitive Languages. In: Banzhaf, W., Ziegler, J., Christaller, T., Dittrich, P., Kim, J.T. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. ECAL 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2801. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39432-7_56
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39432-7_56
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20057-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39432-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive