[Turing-Southampton] Turing at Southampton Seminar | Wednesday 29 January 2020

[Susan Davies]

***apologies if you receive this more than once***

The next Turing at Southampton Seminar will take place on Wednesday 29 January 2020 at 3pm.  Refreshments will be served after the seminar to allow an opportunity for networking.  All are welcome to attend!

Speaker:             James Burridge, University of Portsmouth

Date:                    Wednesday 29 January 2020, 15.00

Location:             Building 54/5025

Title:                    Language Mechanics

Abstract:

Language is one of the primary “signals” emitted by society - a good place to start if we want a mathematical understanding human collective behavior. In this talk I will explore how the tools of statistical physics can be used to model language evolution. First, I will describe a connection between phase ordering in magnetic systems, and the geographical evolution of language. I will show how different universality classes in physical models correspond to alternative hypotheses for the social factors which drive language change, with some models able to predict observed patterns. I will then explore the sound inventories from which languages are built, specifically vowels. Human vowel systems may be shown to spontaneously emerge from a “soup” of diffusing words, modelled as Brownian particles. If we want such diffusive dynamics to accurately fit real linguistic data, then we can again make use of phase ordering models, treating the evolution of sound inventories as an energy minimization process. Finally, I will discuss how a combination of statistical physics and statistical learning might in future allow us to build models with realistic dynamics which fit complex linguistic datasets.

Best wishes

Susan
_____________________________________________
Susan Davies
Coordination Manager, Web Science Institute<https://www.southampton.ac.uk/wsi/index.page?>
University Liaison Manager, The Alan Turing Institute<https://www.southampton.ac.uk/wsi/alan-turing-institute/alan-turing-institute.page>
Room 3041, Building 32
Web Science Institute
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BJ

023 8059 3523 | 07768 266464

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/turing-southampton/attachments/20200123/ac8dfd1b/attachment.html