METU COGS 542: Grammars, Combinators and Cognition (Fall 2023)
WHERE: Middle East Technical University (METU/ODTU), Informatics Institute, Cognitive Science Department
COURSE CODE, TITLE AND CREDIT: COGS 542: Grammars, Combinators and Cognition , (3-0)3
CATALOG DESCRIPTION: Combinators and their syntax-semantics. Combinators and the lexicon. Morphology and grammar. Parsing and language acquisition. Syntactic analyses of various phenomena using combinators. Codeterminism in syntax and semantics. Combinators and serializable knowledge.
LECTURER: Cem Bozsahin (Fall 2023)
phone: 210 7758 (better use my email for contact)
Official Lecture hours: Wednesdays 11.40-14.30 (room S03)
LECTURE FORMAT: Two hours of lecture, in class, no recording, one hour of quiz (either sit-in or take-home)
TA: Rojda Ozcan
DISCUSSION: [group](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/metu-cogs-542)
BACKGROUND REQUIREMENTS: Basic understanding of formal languages, logic, automata and linguistics, at the level of COGS501 and COGS502.
COURSE IN RELATION TO THE PROGRAM: This course is intended as a course in computing track of Cognitive Science. It can be an elective course for other departments.
COURSE OBJECTIVES: To gain an understanding of how order and its semantics can give rise to linguistic structure. To appreciate the different implications of type-dependent and structure-dependent grammars. To build models of syntax, morphology and parsing using combinators. To situate combinatory theories in cognitive science including philosophy, language, music, planning and reasoning.
COURSE OUTLINE:
Combinators have made an impact on mathematics, computer science, psychology, cognitive science and linguistics. This course is a summary of these developments.
For mathematics, they provide a very simple analytic tool for studying foundations of representation. For computer science, they constitute one base for foundation of functional programing. In psychology, they help us understand the idea of affordances, which is one of the hallmarks of ecological psychology. In cognitive science, they have been used to explore things like language of thought and primitives. In linguistics, they form the base of one linguistic theory.
We look at all these aspects.
- W1: Combinators and variable-free computing: What are combinators?
- Combinators and language
- W2: Projecting to surface structure by combinators
- W3: Projected component of grammar
- W4: Parsing and analysis
- W5: Pieces of the projected component: which ones are observable?
- W6: Learning the projected component's parameters
- W7: Obtaining the projected component's items (including probabilistic grammar)
- W8: Monads and combinators
- W9: mid-term exam
- W10-14: Combinators and mind (short presentations by students)
- Planning
- Thought
- Language
- Universal computation
REFERENCE MATERIAL:
There is a course reader in this repo. There is no textbook available for the material. The reader is a collection of preliminary material (on lambda calculus and combinators), tools, and important papers and books about combinators, in language, planning, psychology and technology.
LAB:
- We will use FOUR tools:
One for CCG: CCGlab.
One for Monadic Grammar: TheBench.
One for language of thought: pychuriso.
One for mathematics: Lambda and combinator evaluator
NOTES: In this repo.
COURSE CONDUCT: 10 weeks of lecture and discussions. 4 weeks of research discussion including term presentations. Lab work. Weekly quiz. Quizzes are paper and pencil. Lab work is use of a tool for a mini problem.
GRADING: Mid-term exam 15%, final 15%, 1 lab work %10, presentation %15, 10 weekly quizzes (total %45, max. 9 counted).