learning algorithms

Modern Language Models Refute Nothing

A short response rejecting the scientific contribution of language models as theories.

Benchmarking Compositionality with Formal Languages

A novel method for sampling a class of subsequential string transductions encoding homomorphisms allows rigorous testing of learning models' capacity for compositionality.

History of Phonology: Learnability

This chapter examines the brief but vibrant history of learnability in phonology.

Mathematical Linguistics & Cognitive Complexity

A book chapter on mathematical theories of language and learning, and their consequences for linguistic cognition studies.

Structure and Learning in Natural Language

My doctoral dissertation, examining the relationship between abductive inference and algebraically structured hypothesis spaces, giving a general form for grammar learning over arbitrary linguistic structure.

Typology Emerges from Simplicity in Representations and Learning

We derive the well-studied subregular classes of formal languages, which computationally characterize natural language typology, purely from the perspective of algorithmic learning problems.

Comment on Nonadjacent Dependency Processing in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans

We comment on non-human animals' ability to learn syntactic vs phonological dependencies in pattern-learning experiments.

The Computational Power of Harmony

We overview vowel harmony computationally, describing necessary and sufficient conditions on phonotactics, processes, and learning.

What can formal language theory do for animal cognition studies?

We comment on mathematical fallacies present in artificial grammar learning experiments and suggest how to integrate psycholinguistic and mathematical results.

Probing RNN Encoder-Decoder Generalization of Subregular Functions using Reduplication

We analyze the expressivity of a variety of recurrent encoder-decoder networks, showing they are limited to learning subsequential functions, and connecting RNNs with attention mechanisms to a class of deterministic 2-way transducers.