All speakers can understand a sentence never heard before, or derive the meaning of a word or a sentence from its parts. And yet, these basic linguistic skills have proven very hard to reach by computational models. We are concerned with interdisciplinary research combining linguistic modeling with machine learning techniques. 

We study the notion of similarity and association in the human mono-lingual and bilingual lexicon of humans and machines, the learning and the complexity of morphologically complex systems, the properties of events and clauses as an expression of compositionality, we induce the rules and representations in language by automatic learning techniques.

 

With many other teams in Switzerland, we aim at solving one of humanity’s great mysteries: How did our species develop the ca­pa­city for linguistic expression, for processing language in the brain, and for con­sist­ently passing down new variations to the next generation?