Is possessing a language a quintessentially human trait? Few more readings & views....

For the past 40 years, biologists, psychologists and anthropologists have been chasing Chomsky’s claim of Language as human uniqueness by looking at the capacities of animals to acquire some form of a human natural language under intensive training environments, or for animals to use their natural, species-typical vocalizations in ways that are similar to spoken language. Thus, for example, studies have focused on the capacity of human-reared apes to string symbols together to form sentences or comprehend them and of wild monkey populations to use vocalizations to refer to objects and events in the external environment. Though these studies have met with mixed success, especially as viewed from the perspective of linguists looking at such comparative data for insights into the evolution of language (the calls of these primates show some degree of learnability and of voluntary control), the minimal language of the great apes differs radically from human language.

In their article ‘The Faculty of Language: What is it, who has it and how did it evolve?’

Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (HCF) explore the problem of language evolution in the line of distinguishing language as a communicative system and language as a system concerning abstract computational mechanism. The debate between human language and animal communication is discussed in the light of three parameters: (i) shared vs. unique characteristics of language and animal communication. Although bees dance, birds and whales sing, chimps grunt and scream, they differ from human language since they lack the expressiveness and recursive abilities of human language. 

(ii) Did language evolve gradually or through some qualitative shift? and finally,

(iii) continuity vs. exaptation (whether language evolved by gradual extension of pre-existing communication system or whether important aspects of language have been exapted away from their previous adaptive functions). The article examines the question of what is special about language, which aspects of language inherited from our ancestors have remained unchanged, what has been subjected to modifications and what is qualitatively new. HCF differentiates between two aspects of language that are special, the ‘narrow language faculty (FLN)’ and ‘the faculty of language in its entirety, the broad language faculty (FLB)’. They make the extraordinary proposal that FLN only includes recursion and the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. 

‘Rule Learning by Cotton top Tamarins’ by Hauser, Weiss and Marcus examines whether the ability of rapid generalizing patterns of human infants is uniquely human. To address this problem they have presented the results of an experiment done on tamarins using a familiarization/discrimination method, which showed that tamarins were able to distinguish between novel strings of two different structures- one familiar and the other unfamiliar. This means tamarins are capable of recognizing abstract relations between variables and rules. Then, why can’t they learn language? In reply to this, the authors are of the opinion that ability to language is more than abstracting relations or patterns; it also depends on maintaining a lexicon, the ability to form semantic representation and to link them with syntactic configurations and the ability to represent hierarchical structure. Moreover, there is no evidence to date that monkeys have a theory of mind, which is crucial to language learning.

In ‘Computational Constraints on Syntactic Processing in nonhuman Primates’, Hauser & Fitch say that monkeys are unable to master phrase structure grammar. In their experiment, given exposure to instances of the patterns ABAB and ABABAB, tamarin monkeys showed increased interest in patterns AABB and AAABBB, perhaps because these contained two to four copies of the salient (because repeated) two-element sequences  AA and BB, which they had not heard before. By contrast, given exposure to instances of the patterns AABB and AAABBB, other tamarins did not show significantly increased interest in the patterns ABAB and ABABAB, perhaps because it does not involve a repetition. Given the same stimulus sequences, human subjects were able to categorize the new patterns as different, regardless of the direction of training and testing. The results of the experiment suggests that despite a clear ability to process sequential regularities in acoustics strings, tamarins are unable to process a simple phrase structure, where components of one portion of a string are related to other components some distance away. The article poses the necessity of future work on the computational limitations of non human primates in general.
More to follow...

Evolution of minds and languages: What evolved first and develops first in children: Languages for communicating, or languages for thinking (Generalised Languages: GLs)

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Evolution of minds and languages: What evolved first and develops first in children: Languages for communicating, or languages for thinking (Generalised Languages: GLs)

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Getting acquinted with a new concept (new for me!!)

It so happened that this weekend when I was searching for some of my old Linguistics books, got hold of my bound course work on Semiotics and Philosophy of Language. Though I used to hate this paper in my MA days (but had no option as it was a compulsory paper), just surfed through it after a long time... felt nice... Derrida, Nietzsche, Foucault... their views on life & philosophy, never interested me. But now when I am reading them... seems making sense above everything else.

One such concept I read about is HEGEMONY... somewhat synonymous with Power, but in a different sense. Just quoting few lines: Power is the central fact of the history of human experience. Power constitutes the dominant moments of our relations in society and culture. Power is defined by Max Weber as the possibility of imposing one's will upon others behavor. It can be exercised in various ways: through coercion, with others willingly submitting to it out of fear, through bargain where submission is won through rewards or conditioned power where submission is a willing choice out of conviction.

The concept of hegemony is the acceptance of power through legitimisation, tinging it with principles, values or ideology. Let me give some examples: ideologically inspired by the causes, the LTTE terrorists are commanded by their leaders to the extent of human bombs, willingly laying their lives. Culturally conditioned, an Indian wife submits to her husband's domination. SO power is all cultural, ideological power, it is not an attribute that someone possesses more than others, but a network of relations between the dominated and the dominating. Dominant ideologies put forth by the cultural institutions like society, politics, religion, and most importantly, media. They create a compatible version of reality and are made to seem so natural as 'common sense', that we donot even question the assumptions made!!

I Wish you the strength of all Elements

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The 4 Elements

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PARSING.....PARSING.....PARSING.......

Parsing is the most imporatnt concept when we talk about computer understnading of human language. Mostly all NLP applications such as IE IR, MT, Speech.. all benefit from Parsing. Linguistics as a desicpline has tried to define Parsing as the process of how people interpret language (or language structure!?). What is knowledge of language, where does it reside and how it is used and applied : these are the three fundamental questions of Linguistics theory. In computational terms Parsing involves defining an algorithm that maps any given sentence to its associated synatactic tree structure (is it mandatory to have a tree always??).

If we concieve Parsing in NLP as a process of transforming natural language into an internal system representation, be it in any form.. tree, brackets, graph.. anything, but ultimately the output is a syntactic structure of a given sentence. This structure can be given to a Semantic Analyzer for further interpretation of the meaning of the sentence because structure alone makes no sense like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". What is important is the selectional properties of each word in the utterance and their collocational relation with other words. So we can say that Syntactic Parsing is the first step in the computer processing of natural language. Another contributory part of this process is Lexicon which encodes the syntactic properties and semantic features of each word in the language. And if this lexicon can be presented in such a manner that it defines the conceptual relations among words in a formal way.. we call it Ontology. We can also have multiple ontologies that caters to Sub-categorization frames and Selectional Restrictions of any given word form (mostly of noun, verbs and adjectives). Then Parsing is left with minimal work to do if we can list all the required information (GNP features, Properties etc.) in the Lexicon itself.

What I am trying to say is that the problem with the existing computational grammar formalisms (TAG, LFG, HPSG) is they focus more on syntactic parsing. I am not even sure if  something called Semantic Parsing is acceptable or not. They are more into surface representation rather than understanding the underlying lexical information. But if we explore Generative Linguistics Theory, I feel we can utilize the principles of Minimalist Program by Noam Chomsky for computational parsing. Not because I am a student of Generative Grammar or very fond of it, but I feel Generative Grammar is the only linguistic theory that can be imporated to NLP, at least for MT and Information Extraction. For speech recognition, as experts say, Generative Phonology is not so useful. The advantage of Minimalist Program is that it assumes lexicon to be inflected with all the features and its only at the LF and PF level which decide which feature is to be retained and which to be discarded. Need to study more on this... but I have a gut feeling that its feasible. Lets see.....

Google lanuches Search by Voice for Nokia S60 phone users

Google Mobile App is equipped with speech recognition technology designed to understand Indian accents. Search by voice on mobile will now trigger a Google Search as soon as you speak your search query and give you the required results with a high accuracy rate.