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Caltech

Information, Geometry, and Physics Seminar

Wednesday, November 13, 2024
4:00pm to 5:30pm
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Linde Hall 310
Regular Functions in Linguistics and Language Models
Jon Rawski, Department of Linguistics & Language Development, San Jose State University,

Transductions, or mappings between finite structures like strings and trees, are a fundamental object in theoretical computer science, with many applications in linguistics, information theory, and group theory. This talk will overview recent insights into the theory of transductions in linguistics, in particular restrictions imposed by finite aperiodic semigroups. I will describe boundary conditions (mostly lower) on the kinds of mappings seen in natural language. I will also describe some bounds (again, mostly lower) on transformer sequence models, showing which functions they provably can and cannot compute.

For more information, please contact Mathematics Department by phone at 626-395-4335 or by email at [email protected].