Probabilistic Linguistics

by Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay and Stefanie Jannedy (Eds.)

• ISBN13: 9780262523387
• ISBN10: 0262523388
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic grammars.

Author Biography

Rens Bod is one of the principal architects of the Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) model, which provides a general framework for probabilistic natural language processing Jennifer Hay is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Canterbury Stefanie Jannedy works on the development of text-to-speech systems at Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Introduction to Elementary Probability Theory and Formal Stochastic Language Theory	p. 11
Probabilistic Modeling in Psycholinguistics: Linguistic Comprehension and Production	p. 39
Probabilistic Sociolinguistics: Beyond Variable Rules	p. 97
Probability in Language Change	p. 139
Probabilistic Phonology: Discrimination and Robustness	p. 177
Probabilistic Approaches to Morphology	p. 229
Probabilistic Syntax	p. 289
Probabilistic Approaches to Semantics	p. 343
Glossary of Probabilistic Terms	p. 381
References	p. 389
Name Index	p. 437
Subject Index	p. 445
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