Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

BCS Cog Lunch 3/29 - Steve Piantadosi

Speaker: Steve Piantadosi (Gibson lab)

Title: What is the language of thought?

Time: Tues 3/29, 12pm

Location: 46-3310 (note the change from our usual location)

We present a computational model of learning compositional, structured
concepts in a “language of thought.” We show that language of thought
models out-perform alternatives such as exemplar models in capturing
people’s patterns of generalization in a massive, online,
concept-learning experiment. We additionally develop a method for
formally evaluating different representation languages using the
experimental results. We compare 9 different representation languages
for simple boolean concepts, and 12 for languages for concepts that move
beyond boolean logic, towards the types of representations necessary for
natural language semantics.