Guest speaker: Terry Regier (University of California, Berkeley)

The Computational Linguistics group of the Department of Computer Science is pleased to welcome Terry Regier, a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on language and cognition, particularly with respect to meaning and categorization. His talk, "Semantic typology and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in computational perspective", will be taking place from 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM in PT266 (i.e. the ordinary time and place for the Computational Linguistics Group).

Why do languages have the semantic categories they do, and what do those categories reveal about cognition and communication? Word meanings vary widely across languages, but this variation is constrained. I will argue that this pattern reflects a range of language-specific solutions to a universal functional challenge: that of efficient communication – that is, communicating precisely while using minimal cognitive resources. I will present a general computational framework that instantiates this idea, and will show how that framework accounts for cross-language variation in several semantic domains. I will then address the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - the claim that such language-specific categories in turn shape cognition. I will argue that viewing this hypothesis through the lens of probabilistic inference has the potential to resolve two sources of controversy: the challenge this hypothesis apparently poses to the widespread assumption of a universal groundwork for cognition, and the fact that some findings supporting the hypothesis do not always replicate reliably.