Event Date
Speaker: Kenji Sagae, Linguistics, UC Davis
Title: "Multilingual Neural Grammars and the Polyglot Machine Advantage"
Abstract: Characterizing the languages of the world in terms of their structural similarities and differences is one of the fundamental goals of linguistics. We present a new data-driven approach to linguistic typology, where the differences in the grammars of different languages are encoded in vectors learned from plain text by multilingual neural language models. We then show that it is possible to learn multilingual grammars that can be parameterized using these vectors, allowing a single multilingual grammar to account for the structural patterns of a wide variety of languages. Each language’s unique vector determines how the multilingual grammar is applied to that language. This approach to crosslingual language processing creates exciting opportunities for the development of language technologies for languages facing scarcity of datasets and other resources.
Seminar Date/Time: Thursday November 12th, 4:10pm
This seminar will be delivered remotely via Zoom. To access the Zoom meeting for this seminar, please contact the instructor Fushing Hsieh (fhsieh@ucdavis.edu) or Pete Scully (pscully@ucdavis.edu) for the meeting ID and password, stating your affiliation.