Information-Theoretic Linguistics

Presenters: Richard Futrell

BMRE2

Information theory and its application to human language. Basics of coding theory, efficient codes, the role of redundancy, and the information rate of speech. Maximum Entropy approach to phonology. Lossy compression as a basis for lexical semantics (Information Bottleneck models) and pragmatics (Rational Speech Acts models). Surprisal-based models of online language comprehension and production. Information locality in morphological structure, word order, and compositionality.

Keywords: Communicative Efficiency, Information Theory, Morphology, Pragmatics, Probabilistic Models, Processing, Production, Productivity, Semantics, Syntax, Computational Modeling, Phonology, Psycholinguistics, Theoretical Frameworks

Presenters

Richard Futrell

University of California, Irvine

I work in the UC Irvine Department of Language Science where I lead the Language Processing Group. I study language processing in humans and machines using information theory and Bayesian cognitive modeling. I also work on NLP and AI interpretability.