The structures and patterns found in human languages can be measured according to the computational expressivity required to describe them. A range of claims have been made about the expressivity required for human language sound patterns, and this research aims to contribute to our understanding of this range in two ways. The first is to accurately define the apparent upper bound of expressivity that appears to be required, based on an analysis of a particular set of cases. The second is to explain the uneven distribution of sound patterns across the range of expressivity in terms of the relative learnability of different computational classes.
(joint work with Adam G. McCollum, Anna Mai, and Eric Meinhardt,
and in collaboration with Leon Bergen, Nadia Polikarpova, Shraddha Barke, and Rose Kunkel)
Barke, Shraddha, Rose Kunkel, Nadia Polikarpova, Eric Meinhardt, Eric Bakovic, & Leon Bergen. 2019. "Constraint-based Learning of Phonological Processes." Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019). [postprint]
McCollum, Adam, Eric Baković, Anna Mai, & Eric Meinhardt. 2019. “Unbounded circumambient patterns in segmental phonology.” Revised and resubmitted for review. [manuscript]
McCollum, Adam, Eric Baković, Anna Mai, & Eric Meinhardt. 2018. “The expressivity of segmental phonology and the definition of weak determinism.” [lingbuzz/004197]
Barke, Shraddha, Rose Kunkel, Nadia Polikarpova, Eric Meinhardt, Eric Bakovic, & Leon Bergen. 2019. "Constraint-based Learning of Phonological Processes." 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019). [postprint]
McCollum, Adam, Eric Baković, Anna Mai, and Eric Meinhardt. 2018. “The expressivity of segmental phonology and the definition of weak determinism.” Colloquium, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. [slides]
Meinhardt, Eric, Adam McCollum, Anna Mai, & Eric Baković. 2018. “Weak determinism and its discontents: An alternative to the definition of weakly deterministic regular functions.” 3rd Southern California April Meeting on Phonology, University of Southern California. [slides]
McCollum, Adam, Eric Baković, Anna Mai, & Eric Meinhardt. 2017. “Conditional blocking in Tutrugbu requires non-determinism: implications for the subregular hypothesis.” 47th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS), University of Iceland, Reykjavik. [abstract] [slides]