Evaluating syntactic proposals using minimalist grammars and minimum description length

Evolving Stochastic Context-Free Grammars from Examples Using a Minimum Description Length Principle

This paper describes an evolutionary approach to the problem of inferring stochastic context-free grammars from nite language samples. The approach employs a genetic algorithm, with a tness function derived from a minimum description length principle. Solutions to the inference problem are evolved by optimizing the parameters of a covering grammar for a given language sample. We provide details...

Minimum Description Length Criterion

he intelligibility of speech in communication systems is generally reduced by interfering noise. This interference, which can take the form of environmental noise, reverberation, competing speech, or electronic channel noise, reduces intelligibility by masking the signal of interest. The reduction in intelligibility is particularly troublesome for listeners with hearing impairments, who have gr...

Minimum Description Length Principle

The minimum description length (MDL) principle states that one should prefer the model that yields the shortest description of the data when the complexity of the model itself is also accounted for. MDL provides a versatile approach to statistical modeling. It is applicable to model selection and regularization. Modern versions of MDL lead to robust methods that are well suited for choosing an ...

The Minimum Description Length

Minimum Description Length and Compositionality

In [12] we have shown that the standard de nition of compositionality is formally vacuous; that is, any semantics can be easily encoded as a compositional semantics. We have also shown that when compositional semantics is required to be "systematic", it is possible to introduce a non-vacuous concept of compositionality. However, a technical de nition of systematicity was not given in that paper...