Information Theory in Human Language Processing
Organizers
Speaker
Yuhan Zhang
Time
Thursday, January 9, 2025 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Venue
Online
Online
Zoom 230 432 7880
(BIMSA)
Abstract
The recent decade has witnessed the explosion of artificial intelligence in the domain of natural language processing. Given a natural language input, an NLP algorithm can manage a wide range of tasks at a fascinating level of accuracy. While we marvel at this technology success, we still don't know much about how the human brain (and ourselves) processes and understands human language. In this talk, I will introduce a rising paradigm in the field of cognitive science to study the nature of human language processing. Leveraging the powerful discoveries in Information Theory (Shannon, 1948), research show that the human brain is a rational processor capable of inference given noisy linguistic input and achieves optimal understanding of human language given constraints in cognition.