Event overview
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (Lecturer in computer science at Queen Mary, University of London) will be giving a public lecture at Goldsmiths entitled "Quantum Linguistics".
Mathematical models of natural language can be organised into logical and statistical theories. The former are based on grammatical structures of phrases and sentences and the latter on distributions of words in corpora of text. In joint work with Clark and Coecke, we developed a unifying framework where the distributions of words are composed to form distributions for phrases and sentences. This expanded the application domains of the statistical models -- e.g. automatic reasoning about similarity -- from words to phrases and sentences. On the theoretical side, our model extends the current setting from vectors to tensors. Tensors are main players in the mathematical models of quantum mechanics. In this talk, I will briefly review the theory and applications of our model in simple terms and through examples. I will then show how 'entanglement', a concept arising from tensors in quantum mechanics, manifests itself and is used as a resource in the linguistic applications.
Mehrnoosh's undergraduate and masters studies were from Sharif University in Iran. They did a PhD at university of Quebec at Montreal while being an academic visitor in University of Oxford, where later in 2008, they were awarded an EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Wolfson College Research Fellowship, and in 2011, an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship. At the moment, Mehrnoosh is a lecturer in computer science at Queen Mary, University of London. Her main research interests are logical and mathematical tools/theories and their applications to artificial intelligence.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 27 Jan 2016 | 5:30pm - 6:30pm |
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