Fragment Grammars: Exploring Computation and Reuse in Language
Author(s)
O'Donnell, Timothy J.
Tenenbaum, Joshua B.
Goodman, Noah D.
Advisor(s)
Joshua Tenenbaum
Date Issued
March 31, 2009
Citation
O'DONNELL, T., GOODMAN, N., and TENENBAUM, J. 2009. Fragment Grammars: Exploring Computation and Reuse in Language. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report Series, MIT-CSAIL-TR-2009-013.
Series/Report no.
MIT-CSAIL-TR-2009-013
Abstract
Language relies on a division of labor between stored units and structure building operations which combine the stored units into larger structures. This division of labor leads to a tradeoff: more structure-building means less need to store while more storage means less need to compute structure. We develop a hierarchical Bayesian model called fragment grammar to explore the optimum balance between structure-building and reuse. The model is developed in the context of stochastic functional programming (SFP) and in particular using a probabilistic variant of Lisp known as the Church programming language (Goodman, Mansinghka, Roy, Bonawitz, & Tenenbaum, 2008). We show how to formalize several probabilistic models of language structure using Church, and how fragment grammar generalizes one of them---adaptor grammars (Johnson, Griffiths, & Goldwater, 2007). We conclude with experimental data with adults and preliminary evaluations of the model on natural language corpus data.
Subjects
Language
Stochastic Functional Programming
Stochastic Memoization
Reuse
Lexicon
Hierarchical Bayes
Persistent DSpace Link
