The Representation of Language in Brains and Machines

This meeting will discuss the convergence and divergence between the statistical, neuroscientific and formal approaches to language. The last decade was marked by major advances in statistical and machine learning approaches to language, leading to new representations and practical applications. At the same time, cognitive neuroscience made significant progress on the representation of language in the brain, and formal linguistics continued to make steady progress on the structural description of language. The three approaches have followed largely independent paths, as is natural given the substantive differences in methodologies and aims. Nevertheless, one could have expected a higher level of integration, as they all study the representation of natural language. This workshop will promote the interaction between these domains, through presentations by a selected group of linguists, cognitive and brain scientists, and researchers in machine learning.