Prof. Srini Narayanan | Simulation Semantics

19 March 2014, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany Prof. Srini Narayanan talk at 5th EUCogIII Members Conference Title: Simulation Semantics: A computational framework linking language, cognition, and action Slides: http://www.eucognition.org/uploads/docs/EUCogIII_Fifth_Conf_Bochum_2014/Narayanan_BochumTalk.pdf Abstract: Simulation semantics hypothesizes the mind as "simulating" the external world while functioning it. The "simulation" takes the best-fitting model of the noisy linguistic input together with general knowledge and makes new inferences to figure out what the input means and to guide response. This talk will briefly describe the simulation semantics hypothesis and report on a computational realization along with recent results on applying the model to long standing problems in language understanding. In terms of computational modeling, simulation semantics integrates models and phenomena at multiple scales providing a bridging framework that combines multi-scale probabilistic dynamic inference with deep semantic analysis based on construction grammar, frame semantics, and cognitive linguistics. Bio: Prof. Srini Narayanancurrently leads the AI group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), is a core faculty member in the Cognitive Science Program, and an a faculty member at the Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences (ICBS) at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include Artificial intelligence, cognitive science, socially relevant computing, web semantics, cognitive and neural computation, learning and control in complex systems.