Emerging Computational Linguistics

Today I was pondering the issue of head directionality of languages – does the head of a phrase come before or after the remaining portion of the phrase.  This parameter has been largely disregarded because most languages are inconsistent its use.

However, it occurred to me that infants could rely on the heavy weighting of head directionality when they are first learning a language.  By choosing the direction that is predominant and ignoring the incoming utterances of the opposite direction, it would simplify the initial learning phase.

Perhaps someone has already proposed this little insight into child language acquisition.

As I was pondering this, it also occurred to me that the single most important characteristic of a language is that it can be learned by an infant.  If the majority of infants in a culture can’t learn the language of their parents, then that language will not persist.  It will die out.

Perhaps someone else has already proposed this little insight as well.

Here are two links to videos on Unsupervised Learning of natural language syntax.

Chris Manning gave this talk at MLCS 2007.  It is a fairly detailed discussion of the work that Chris did with Dan Klein on learning syntax structure.  Dan used the material for his dissertation.

Chris Manning Video

Dan Klein gave this talk at UAI 2008.  It is more high level, and describes how Dan and his students have applied their work to a few other areas of unsupervised learning.

Dan Klein Video

Both these videos are worth watching.