Bob Frank presents work at the Society for Computation in Linguistics

The fourth annual meeting of the Society for the Computation in Linguistics took place during the week of February 15-19 on-line, bringing together on zoom a group of computational and mathematical linguists. As part of the events, Bob Frank presented two pieces of work: one was an oral presentation with Karl Mulligan (JHU) and Tal Linzen (NYU), entitled “Structure Here, Bias There: Hierarchical Generalization by Jointly Learning Syntactic Transformations”. This work looked at the degree to which neural network models of language learning could leverage information about the presence of hierarchical structure from one grammatical structure to another. A second presentation, this time with former Yale post-doc Tim Hunter (UCLA) was a poster on “Comparing Methods of Tree-Construction Across Mildly Context-Sensitive Formalisms”, which looked at distinctions in the ability of different constrained grammar formalisms to derive structural descriptions for phenomena like multiple wh-movement.