Steven Piantadosi


about

I study how people use probabilistic inference to learn and process language.

I am a postdoc at the University of Rochester in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, working with Dick Aslin. In 2011, I finished my Ph.D. at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, working with Ted Gibson and Josh Tenenbaum.

My other main collaborators are Noah Goodman (compositional learning projects), Hal Tily (communicative language design projects), Celeste Kidd (infant statistical learning projects), Evelina Fedorenko (language processing & fMRI), Kyle Mahowald (lexical design), and Peter Graff (semantics and lexical work).

You can read about some recent work here and here .

I am an NCSE Steve who really likes free software, wikipedia, accordions, and stickin' it to the man.

CV

A current CV is available here.

phd thesis

My thesis studied learning in language of thought models, in which learners compose simple functions in order to express complex concepts like those needed for natural language. [read it here]. A precis is available here.

software

  • LOTlib is a library for modeling learning complex concepts as compositions of primitives in a language of thought. Please note that this is still under heavy development. GPL3

  • kelpy (kid experimental library in python) is a library for running simple psychology experiments in python. It is intended primarily for making simple animated displays with simple responses for baby and child experiments. It is built on top of pygame and is under heavy development at present. Email me for updates / questions. GPL3

  • ngrampy is a python library for manipulating large google ngram data sets, and computing measures such as average surprisal in context from Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson (2011). Code is included to replicate that finding (email me if you don't have the corpora). GPL3

  • Turkolizer software for analyzing linguistic data gathered on mechanical turk (paper here). This software was primarily developed by Ted Gibson and Kris Fedorenko.

  • Miscellaneous utilities: olden: A simple script for copying old files into a backup directory. You can make this a right-click option in Ubuntu/nautilus. I use it to keep a copy of files before I make major changes. mpibash: A python script (uses LOTlib) for executing bash commands simply on an MPI cluster. syncout: A utility for synchronizing multiple bash processes output to the same text file. All are GPL3.

papers

 
S.T. Piantadosi. Approximate number from first principles. Under review. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, L. Stearns, D. Everett, and E. Gibson. A corpus analysis of Pirahã grammar: An investigation of recursion. Talk presented at the LSA (by E. Gibson). Paper in progress. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, J. Jara-Ettinger, and E. Gibson. Children's development of number in an indigenous farming-foraging group. Under review. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, N. Goodman, and J.B. Tenenbaum. Modeling the acquisition of quantifier semantics: a case study in function word learnability. Under review. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, C. Kidd, and R.N. Aslin. Rich methods for infant looking data. Under review. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
C. Kidd, S.T. Piantadosi, and R.N. Aslin. The Goldilocks effect in infant auditory cognition. Under review. [ bib | email ]
 
E. Fedorenko, S.T. Piantadosi, Lillia Cherkasskiy, Jonathan Scholz, and Rebecca Saxe. What you think when you hear “I think”: What does it take to engage Theory of Mind during language comprehension? Under review. [ bib | email ]
 
E. Gibson, L. Bergen, and S.T. Piantadosi. Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in press. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, H. Tily, and E. Gibson. Information content versus word length in natural language: A reply to Ferrer-i-Cancho and Moscoso del Prado Martin (2011). Under review. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi and E. Gibson. Quantitative standards for absolute linguistic universals. Under review. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
E. Gibson, E. Fedorenko, S.T. Piantadosi, and P. Graff. Presuppositional differences in quantified Antecedent-Contained-Deletion relative clauses: A reply to Hackl, Koster-Hale & Varvoutis (2011). Under revision. [ bib | email ]
 
E. Gibson, S.T. Piantadosi, K. Brink, L. Bergen, E. Lim, and R. Saxe. A noisy-channel account of crosslinguistic word order variation. Psychological Science, In press, 2012. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
K. Mahowald, E. Fedorenko, S.T. Piantadosi, and E. Gibson. Info/information theory: speakers choose shorter words in predictive contexts. Cognition, In press. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, J.B. Tenenbaum, and N.D Goodman. Bootstrapping in a language of thought: a formal model of numerical concept learning. Cognition, 123:199-217, 2012. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
E. Fedorenko, S.T. Piantadosi, and E. Gibson. The interaction of syntactic and lexical information sources in language processing: The case of the noun-verb ambiguity. Journal of Cognitive Science, 2012. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
E. Gibson, S.T. Piantadosi, and E. Fedorenko. Quantitative methods in syntax / semantics research: A response to Sprouse & Almeida. Language and Cognitive Processes, 2012. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
C. Kidd, S.T. Piantadosi, and R.N. Aslin. The Goldilocks effect: Human infants allocate attention to visual sequences that are neither too simple nor too complex. PLoS ONE, 2012. [ bib | http ]
 
E. Fedorenko, S. Piantadosi, and E. Gibson. Processing relative clauses in supportive contexts. Cognitive Science, 36:1-27, 2012. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi. Learning and the language of thought. PhD thesis, MIT, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, H. Tily, and E. Gibson. The communicative function of ambiguity in language. Cognition, 122:280-291, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, H. Tily, and E. Gibson. Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(9):3526, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, H. Tily, and E. Gibson. Reply to Reilly and Kean: Clarifications on word length and information content. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(20):E109, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
E. Gibson, S.T. Piantadosi, and K. Fedorenko. Using Mechanical Turk to Obtain and Analyze English Acceptability Judgments. Language and Linguistics Compass, 5(8):509-524, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi and J.P. Crutchfield. How the dimension of space affects the products of pre-biotic evolution: The spatial population dynamics of structural complexity and the emergence of membranes. Santa Fe Institute Working Paper arXiv:1010.5019, 2010. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi. Symbolic dynamics on free groups. Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems, 20(3):725-738, 2008. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, J.B. Tenenbaum, and N.D. Goodman. Beyond boolean logic: exploring representation languages for learning complex concepts. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2010. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
C. Kidd, S.T. Piantadosi, and R.N. Aslin. The Goldilocks effect: Infants' preference for visual stimuli that are neither too predictable nor too surprising. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2010. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
H. Tily and ST Piantadosi. Refer efficiently: Use less informative expressions for more predictable meanings. In Proceedings of the workshop on the production of referring expressions: Bridging the gap between computational and empirical approaches to reference, 2009. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, H.J. Tily, and E. Gibson. The communicative lexicon hypothesis. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 2582-2587, 2009. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi, N.D. Goodman, B.A. Ellis, and J.B. Tenenbaum. A Bayesian model of the acquisition of compositional semantics. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2008. [ bib | .pdf ]
 
S.T. Piantadosi. Symbolic dynamics on free groups. Senior Honors Thesis, 2006. [ bib | .pdf ]

data

  • My data from all papers published and in progress is available upon request.

previous research projects & groups

fun