Reinforcement Learning of Minimalist Numeral Grammars

Speech-controlled user interfaces facilitate the operation of devices and household functions to laymen. State-of-the-art language technology scans the acoustically analyzed speech signal for relevant keywords that are subsequently inserted into semantic slots to interpret the user's intent. In order to develop proper cognitive information and communication technologies, simple slot-filling should be replaced by utterance meaning transducers (UMT) that are based on semantic parsers and a \emph{mental lexicon}, comprising syntactic, phonetic and semantic features of the language under consideration. This lexicon must be acquired by a cognitive agent during interaction with its users. We outline a reinforcement learning algorithm for the acquisition of the syntactic morphology and arithmetic semantics of English numerals, based on minimalist grammar (MG), a recent computational implementation of generative linguistics. Number words are presented to the agent by a teacher in form of utterance meaning pairs (UMP) where the meanings are encoded as arithmetic terms from a suitable term algebra. Since MG encodes universal linguistic competence through inference rules, thereby separating innate linguistic knowledge from the contingently acquired lexicon, our approach unifies generative grammar and reinforcement learning, hence potentially resolving the still pending Chomsky-Skinner controversy.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur

Dependency structures derived from minimalist grammars

Abstract. This paper provides an interpretation of Minimalist Grammars [16,17] in terms of dependency structures. Under this interpretation, merge operations derive projective dependency structures, and movement operations introduce both non-projectivity and illnestedness. This new characterization of the generative capacity of Minimalist Grammar makes it possible to discuss the linguistic relevance of non-projectivity and illnestedness. This in turn provides insight into grammars that derive structures with these properties. 1