Research

I am interested in the relationship between (especially usage-based and cognitive approaches to) linguistics on the one hand, and natural language processing on the other hand. The neural turn in NLP has realized many ideas already proposed much earlier in the literature on connectionist modelling. Yet, it remains elusive how well state-of-the-art models and the cognitive/linguistic reality actually map to one another.

In my research, I explore the ways in which linguistic knowledge emerges in human language learners and neural language models – mostly from a usage-based and constructionist perspective. Lately, my research focus in this direction has been on very small language models trained with small amounts of data, and their comparability to child language development.