CLASP
The Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability

Linguistic Creativity and Computational Modeling of Language

Abstract

Many areas and theories in linguistics are concerned with regularities and conventions in language and interaction, essentially focussing on modeling language as a system. Yet, actual language data is often full of deviations from these regularities. When using language as a tool for interaction, speakers seem to have the ability to go beyond the conventions of the community they belong to and still be communicatively successful. In this talk, I will report on some recent attempts in linguistics (also in Bielefeld) to integrate creative aspects of language use with traditional approaches to language and to put linguistic creativity at the forefront of linguistic research. I will discuss how these ideas may relate to computational approaches in language and dialogue modeling and why they may constitute an interesting challenge for today’s heavily data-driven frameworks. Last but not least, I will present recent and ongoing experiments on language generation and modeling that could be used to study linguistic creativity in computational settings.