Achievement

For our IGERT we proposed to develop a seminar in the new area of ’statistical Linguistics", applying insights from statistical computational linguistics to problems in theoretical linguistics. New core faculty member Colin Wilson created such a seminar this year, using Bayesian and generative statistical models to explain psychological and neuroscientific data (considering data from speech perception and vision), examining proposals for how Bayesian inference could be implemented in the brain, and addressing principled statistical methods for comparing competing models of a given set of data. The seminar addressed current research issues of trainees, allowing them to see the direct relevance of these abstract methods to their work, while simultaneously advancing their research.