The Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences Colloquium Series and Center for Language Science present

“Unified Cognitive Science and the ICSI/UCB Neural Theory of Language Project”
with Jerry Feldman, UC Berkeley

Thursday, May 29
4:00–5:00 p.m.
Social Science Plaza A, Room 2112

The talk will be an overview of the past, present, and future of the ICSI/UCB Neural Theory of Language (NTL) project. NTL is a computational attempt to bridge the gaps between our understanding of language and its neural embodiment . Although these gaps are large, findings from multiple disciplines (principally biology, computer science, linguistics and psychology) help constrain viable bridging theories. The goal is a plausible account of how people learn and use language. We suggest significant progress has been made, and that currently active projects are promising.

The first section will outline the multi-disciplinary foundations of NTL. The second section will describe continuing efforts to build practical language-understanding systems using these principles. The current application focus is on metaphor understanding and on teaching complex tasks to robots. Time permitting, the final discussion will suggest reformulating a unified Cognitive Science based on "Actionability" instead of the traditional grounding in "Truth". This is a natural outgrowth of our ongoing scientific and applied work.

For further information, please contact Joanna Kerner, kernerj@uci.edu or 949.824.8651.