Pieter Wellens

My main research focus is on the emergence and evolution of grammar. According to the functional approach to language evolution (inspired by cognitive linguistics and construction grammar), grammar arises to deal with issues in communication among autonomous agents, particularly maximisation of communicative success and expressive power and minimisation of coginitive effort. My experiments in the emergence of grammar hence start from a simulation of communicative exchanges between embodied agents, and then show how a particular issue that arises can be solved or partially solved by processes of grammaticalisation.

In more detail I focus on the issue of search during parsing and interpretation. Multiple hypotheses arise in parsing when the same syntactic pattern can be used for multiple purposes or when one syntactic pattern partly overlaps with another one. At the AI-Lab we use two highly sophisticated tools for doing our experiments, semantic aspects are handled through grounded procedural semantic based on a constraint language called the Incremental Recruitment Language (IRL). Lexicon and grammar use the Fluid Construction Grammar framework (FCG). These frameworks are now combined into one which we call Babel 2.