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Robert Frank

Robert Frank, PhD

Faculty Member

Center for Neurocomputation and Machine Intelligence

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Computational modeling of human language

Robert Frank's research explores computational models of language learning and processing as well as the role of computational constraints in linguistic explanation. The Computational Linguistics at Yale (CLAY) Lab is an interdisciplinary research group interested in theoretical and applied questions related to computational approaches to language learning and the processing and representation of linguistic structure.

Methods

Topics

Biography

Frank received a BS in Cognitive Science from MIT in 1987 and a PhD in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. Before joining Yale's Linguistics department in 2008, he was a Professor in the Cognitive Science faculty at Johns Hopkins and an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at the University of Delaware. Bob's wife, Raffaella Zanuttini, is also a member of the Yale Linguistics faculty, and they have raised two bilingual children, Gabriel and Dani.

Research Contributions

How Abstract Is Linguistic Generalization in Large Language Models? Experiments with Argument Structure

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2023)

How poor is the stimulus? Evaluating hierarchical generalization in neural networks trained on child-directed speech

Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2023)