Michael Franke is professor of Cognitive Modeling at the Institute of Cognitive Science (Osnabrück, Germany). He is interested broadly in cognitive and evolutionary modeling and applications thereof to language use, reasoning, decision making and other features of higher-order cognition. The focus of his work is on experimental pragmatics, supplemented with probabilistic modeling. He is interested in foundational questions concerning the relation between empirical data, abstract theory and explicit mathematical modeling.
Theory-Driven Statistical Modeling for Semantics & Pragmatics
Theoretical linguistics postulates abstract structures that successfully explain key aspects of language, such as semantic meaning. However, the precise relation between abstract theoretical ideas and empirical data from language use is not always straightforward. I propose to empirically test abstract semantic theories through the lens of probabilistic pragmatic modeling using statistical model comparison of theory-driven models which embed semantic ideas as key functional elements. Two case studies are present. One on grammatically generated implicature readings, and one on the logical structure of quantifier meanings.
