Modeling Human Sentence Processing

Google Tech Talks
April, 17 2008

ABSTRACT

Modeling human sentence-processing can help us both better understand how the brain processes language, and also help improve user interfaces. For example, our systems could compare different (computer-generated) sentences and produce ones that are easiest to understand.

I will talk about my work on evaluating theories about syntactic processing difficulty on a large eye-tracking corpus, and present a model of sentence processing which uses an incremental, fully connected parsing strategy.

Speaker: Vera Demberg
Vera Demberg is a Ph.D. student in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research focus is on building computational models of human sentence processing.

Vera obtained a Diplom (MSc) in Computational Linguistics from Stuttgart University, and a MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. She has published papers in a number of top venues for language processing and psycholinguistic research, including ACL, EACL, CogSci and Cognition.

For her PhD research, she's been awarded the AMLaP Young Scientist Award for best platform presentation by a junior scientist. She was a finalist for the Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2007.

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[brombie314]

That voice is death.

[spreadthegospel]

Very interesting. She did a good job explaining the subject.

[gordapuerk]

very interesting really... i become very interest about the Human Sentence Processing, and i found that the investigation are in process..

y a la rubia le rompo el orto al medio

[love2000mak]

I have to say that I'm suffering from her accent.

I would appreciate if this video comes with English titles.

[mistersmith6000]

"Processing difficulty of syntax" is relative to, or absolute and exclusive of, frequency of lexus in corpus?

[yijisoo]

Really?

[tommasfoolery]

dude, she is cute.

[macdweeb]

Perhaps the subject relative clause is faster to interpret than the object relative clause because it matches better how the information is stored in the brain.