Research
How can people and machines learn and use language? My research addresses this question by drawing on ideas and techniques from computational and cognitive linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, and developmental psychology. More specific areas of focus include language learning, language understanding, lexical semantics, probabilistic inference, machine learning, knowledge representation, and neural and connectionist models of computation.
My work is part of the Neural Theory of Language project, whose modest goals include understanding how language and cognition work, and how both of these are grounded in the brain. My adviser in these endeavors is Jerome Feldman.
Modeling language structure, acquisition and use
The overarching goal of my research is to build integrated models of language structure, acquisition and use that are both cognitively and computationally motivated.
My dissertation describes a computational model of the transition from single words to early multiword constructions that instantiates each of the components above. See here for more information.
