In episode 107 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Ted Gibson.
Ted is a Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT. He leads the TedLab, which investigates why languages look the way they do; the relationship between culture and cognition, including language; and how people learn, represent, and process language.
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(02:13) Prof Gibson’s background
(05:33) The computational linguistics community and NLP, engineering focus
(10:48) Models of brains
(12:03) Prof Gibson’s focus on behavioral work
(12:53) How dependency distances impact language processing
(14:03) Dependency distances and the origin of the problem
(18:53) Dependency locality theory
(21:38) The structures languages tend to use
(24:58) Sentence parsing: structural integrations and memory costs
(36:53) Reading strategies vs. ordinary language processing
(40:23) Legalese
(46:18) Cross-dependencies
(50:11) Number as a cognitive technology
(54:48) Experiments
(1:03:53) Why counting is useful for Western societies
(1:05:53) The Whorf hypothesis
(1:13:05) Language as Communication
(1:13:28) The noisy channel perspective on language processing
(1:27:08) Fedorenko lab experiments—language for thought vs. communication and Chomsky’s claims
(1:43:53) Thinking without language, inner voices, language processing vs. language as an aid for other mental processing
(1:53:01) Dependency grammars and a critique of Chomsky’s grammar proposals, LLMs
(2:08:48) LLM behavior and internal representations
(2:12:53) Outro
Links:
Research — linguistic complexity and dependency locality theory
Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies (1998)
The Dependency Locality Theory: A Distance-Based Theory of Linguistic Complexity (2000)
Consequences of the Serial Nature of Linguistic Input for Sentential Complexity (2005)
Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages (2015)
Dependency locality as an explanatory principle for word order (2020)
A resource-rational model of human processing of recursive linguistic structure (2022)
Research — language processing / communication and cross-linguistic universals
Ted Gibson: The Structure and Purpose of Language