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Wow, those are some interesting links. As somebody who's learned a foreign language to near-fluency as an adult, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out
by ekidd 13y ago
Wow, those are some interesting links.
As somebody who's learned a foreign language to near-fluency as an adult, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how my brain infers a grammar from large quantities of input. Subjectively, it feels like my brain learns fixed phrases, and then notices that certain chunks can be replaced by subtrees of the appropriate type.
There are complications: inflections, gender, agreement, probability, and so on. But still, grammar compression looks like a fascinating formulation of the problem.
- ot 13y agoYes that's what algorithms like RePair and Sequitur do: they build the tree bottom-up by replacing frequent subtrees with a new rule at each iteration. I think that this is also the basic idea behind the usage-based model in linguistics, a theory on how we learn languages: The usage-based model is based on inductive learning, meaning that linguistic knowledge is acquired in a bottom-up manner through use. It allows for redundancy and generalizations, because the language user generalizes over recurring experiences of use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar#Grammar_as_an_inventory_of_constructions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar#Grammar_as...
- thibauts 13y agoVery interesting. I feel like the very concept of a grammar is only a model we cast on language to make it easier to deal with. Langage is pretty free and can work without it. Grammar feels to me like a normalization "by contract". We normalize, then study the normalization tool itself without being aware it is an artefact. We model the model, give it free parameters, randomness, serendipity to make it accomodate reality and its endless string of special cases. We even try to separate meaning from experience. This all feels more like a network of relations and probabilities of coocurrence of various (free?) orders. I followed your link and I strongly feel the suffix "grammar" is the real burden here. We're trying to put structure on what is actually creating it.
- derleth 13y agoEvery language has grammar by definition. We're just trying to discover it. It's like the laws of physics: We have laws which seem to work, but we know they're not the whole story, so we observe more of what happens and try to bring our laws into harmony with the actual underlying laws.