Objective From the late '50s until the early '70s, theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics, were united by a common model based on Chomskian transformational generative grammar formalism. This consensus fell apart in the later 70s, because of disagreements about the role of semantics. Formal syntax has abandoned semantics and any interest in formal constraint. Semantically based functional and cognitive theories of grammar are agnostic about formalism. Current psycholinguistic theories mainly ignore formal linguistic theory, while in computational linguistics, the dominant models are generally low-level finite-state or context-free systems that are known to to be incomplete with respect to the full range of of human language. While the latter methods, aided by machine-learning, have made considerable progress in practical applications such as automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and parsing, they place inherent limits on performance that are already yielding near-asymptotic performance in some applications. The aim of the proposal is to restore grammatical theory to its necessary place in the theory of human language behaviour, by providing a more restricted theory of constructions than others on offer. This formalism is both efficiently parsable, and expressive enough to support semantic interpretation. The project seeks both to establish the explanatory adequacy of the theory in linguistic terms, and to generalize existing treebank-based computational models derived by supervised learning methods. It uses unsupervised and semi-supervised methods based on unlabeled data. A crucial component will be a fully articulated Natural Semantics closely related to the surface grammar, supporting entailment directly. Fields of science humanitieslanguages and literaturegeneral language studieshumanitieslanguages and literaturelinguisticsnatural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learningsupervised learningnatural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencenatural language processingsocial sciencespsychologypsycholinguistics Programme(s) FP7-IDEAS-ERC - Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013) Topic(s) ERC-AG-SH4 - ERC Advanced Grant - The Human Mind and its complexity Call for proposal ERC-2009-AdG See other projects for this call Funding Scheme ERC-AG - ERC Advanced Grant Host institution THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH EU contribution € 1 910 998,00 Address OLD COLLEGE, SOUTH BRIDGE EH8 9YL Edinburgh United Kingdom See on map Region Scotland Eastern Scotland Edinburgh Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Administrative Contact Angela Noble (Ms.) Principal investigator Mark Jerome Steedman (Prof.) Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Total cost No data Beneficiaries (1) Sort alphabetically Sort by EU Contribution Expand all Collapse all THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH United Kingdom EU contribution € 1 910 998,00 Address OLD COLLEGE, SOUTH BRIDGE EH8 9YL Edinburgh See on map Region Scotland Eastern Scotland Edinburgh Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Administrative Contact Angela Noble (Ms.) Principal investigator Mark Jerome Steedman (Prof.) Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Total cost No data
