A Mathematical View of Language
Tai-Danae Bradley - X, the Moonshot Factory
March 26, 2021, 2:30 p.m. - March 26, 2021, 3:30 p.m.
Zoom (see link below)
Hosted by: Prakash Panangaden
From a mathematical perspective, natural language exhibits rich structure. It is both algebraic and statistical, in the basic sense that words concatenate to form longer expressions and the frequencies of those expressions contribute to their meaning. Similar mathematical structure is found in quantum many body systems, which prompts the use of basic tools from quantum probability theory to investigate the structure found in language. I’ll discuss these ideas and will also describe how a particular passage from classical to quantum probability encodes some of the desired information. I’ll then give a high-level presentation of how the algebraic and statistical structure of language finds a nice home in category theory, a modern branch of pure mathematics.
Tai-Danae Bradley is currently a postdoc at X, the Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X). She finished her PhD in mathematics in spring 2020 at the CUNY Graduate Center under the supervision of John Terilla. Her research interests lie in the intersection of quantum physics, machine intelligence, and category theory.
Zoom link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/89510442560 (zoom login required)
Reception after the talk in gather town: https://gather.town/app/3qgGGqVmX8sDW2Zb/Reception
