Thursday, June 12, 2008

How Does Language Work?

I have asked this question before here. My answer now, as it was then, is this: I dunno.

But Michael Gasser, Indiana University Associate Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science, thinks he does so he wrote this freely available book: "how language works".

I like free books, but I haven't read it yet (I just got myself deep into Kundera's Laughable Loves. I've always been a sucker for Kundera).

I like Gasser's background. His work has focused on "computational models of human language acquisition and language behavior." Cool stuff. His recent work involves finding ways to use technology to help gather training data for statistical machine translation and then to integrate symbolic knowledge of grammar rules with statistical knowledge of training data. Cool boots.

2 comments:

Asphodel said...

Sweet. I read Unberable Lightness and am now on Life is Elsewhere....
Gr8 Reads.


Melikes your blog, I hope I make it back-- my favourites have too many added and too little time :-(

Chris said...

Thanks for the comment, asphodel. I'll check out your blog too.

TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...