Eye Tracking While Reading For Psycholinguistic And Computational Models Of Language Comprehension

Eye-tracking While Reading for Psycholinguistic and Computational Models of Language Comprehension

Cognitive Plausibility in Natural Language Processing

This book explores the cognitive plausibility of computational language models and why it’s an important factor in their development and evaluation. The authors present the idea that more can be learned about cognitive plausibility of computational language models by linking signals of cognitive processing load in humans to interpretability methods that allow for exploration of the hidden mechanisms of neural models. The book identifies limitations when applying the existing methodology for representational analyses to contextualized settings and critiques the current emphasis on form over more grounded approaches to modeling language. The authors discuss how novel techniques for transfer and curriculum learning could lead to cognitively more plausible generalization capabilities in models. The book also highlights the importance of instance-level evaluation and includes thorough discussion of the ethical considerations that may arise throughout the various stages of cognitive plausibility research.

Computational Cognitive Modeling and Linguistic Theory

This open access book introduces a general framework that allows natural language researchers to enhance existing competence theories with fully specified performance and processing components. Gradually developing increasingly complex and cognitively realistic competence-performance models, it provides running code for these models and shows how to fit them to real-time experimental data. This computational cognitive modeling approach opens up exciting new directions for research in formal semantics, and linguistics more generally, and offers new ways of (re)connecting semantics and the broader field of cognitive science. The approach of this book is novel in more ways than one. Assuming the mental architecture and procedural modalities of Anderson’s ACT-R framework, it presents fine-grained computational models of human language processing tasks which make detailed quantitative predictions that can be checked against the results of self-paced reading and other psycho-linguistic experiments. All models are presented as computer programs that readers can run on their own computer and on inputs of their choice, thereby learning to design, program and run their own models. But even for readers who won't do all that, the book will show how such detailed, quantitatively predicting modeling of linguistic processes is possible. A methodological breakthrough and a must for anyone concerned about the future of linguistics! (Hans Kamp) This book constitutes a major step forward in linguistics and psycholinguistics. It constitutes a unique synthesis of several different research traditions: computational models of psycholinguistic processes, and formal models of semantics and discourse processing. The work also introduces a sophisticated python-based software environment for modeling linguistic processes. This book has the potential to revolutionize not only formal models of linguistics, but also models of language processing more generally. (Shravan Vasishth)