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KMi Seminars
Syntactic measuring of language distances
This event took place on Friday 17 December 2010 at 13:00

 
Prof. Giuseppe Longobardi University of Trieste

Beyond its theoretical success, the development of molecular biology has brought about the possibility of extraordinary progress in the historical study of classification and distribution of different species and different human populations, introducing a new level of evidence on diversity (molecular genetic markers) apt, among other things, to quantitative and automatic treatment. I claim that, even in the cognitive sciences, purely theoretical progress in a certain discipline, such as linguistics, may have analogous historical impact, and in turn be confirmed by such results. Thus, I will propose to unify two unrelated lines of investigation:

  1. the study of syntactic variation (parameter theory) in the biolinguistic program
  2. the reconstruction of phylogenetic relatedness among languages
I will suggest that we are now in the position of measuring the syntactic distance among different languages and populations in a precise fashion and to explore its historical significance through the application of clustering algorithms borrowed from computational biology. The historical success of the resulting taxonomies may then support the reliability of the new method of distance calculation.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.