Unsupervised Learning of Syntactic Structure

Probabilistic models of language. ''Everybody knows that language is variable'' - Sapir (1921). \\ Probabilistic models give precise descriptions of a variable, uncertain world. The choice for language isn’t a dichotomy between rules and neural networks. Probabilistic models can be used over rich linguistic representations. They support inference and learning. There’s not much evidence of a poverty of the stimulus preventing them being used.