Charles Yang

About

Charles Yang is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he specializes in linguistics, computer science, and psychology, with a focus on learning by humans and machines. He studied computer science at the MIT AI Lab and has held faculty positions at Yale before moving to Penn. At Penn, he teaches and conducts research in his interdisciplinary fields, serving as the Chair of the linguistics department and having been the Director of the Program in Cognitive Science since 2011. He co-directs the Integrated Language Science and Technology group with John Trueswell. Yang has authored several books, including 'The Price of Linguistic Productivity,' which was awarded the Leonard Bloomfield Award from the Linguistic Society of America. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Economics
• History
• Macroeconomics
• Geography
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Miller's monkey updated: Communicative efficiency and the statistics of words in natural language

  Cognition · 2020 · 56 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Greedy and Recursive Search for Morphological Productivity

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2021-05-12 · 38 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  As children acquire the knowledge of their language's morphology, they invariably discover the productive processes that can generalize to new words. Morphological learning is made challenging by the fact that even fully productive rules have exceptions, as in the well-known case of English past tense verbs, which features the -ed rule against the irregular verbs. The Tolerance Principle is a recent proposal that provides a precise threshold of exceptions that a productive rule can withstand. It…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Modeling Morphological Typology for Unsupervised Learning of Language Morphology

  2020 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  This paper describes a language-independent model for fully unsupervised morphological analysis that exploits a universal framework leveraging morphological typology. By modeling morphological processes including suffixation, prefixation, infixation, and full and partial reduplication with constrained stem change rules, our system effectively constrains the search space and offers a wide coverage in terms of morphological typology. The system is tested on nine typologically and genetically diver…

  DOI

• A User’s Defense of the Tolerance Principle: Reply to Enger (2022)

  Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (PBB) · 2023-11-23 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract I provide an overview of the Tolerance Principle, its motivation, supporting evidence, and applications, with particular focus on how it can be used recursively to discover linguistic regularities of varying scopes. It corrects the misunderstandings in Enger’s recent article but the more important goal is to provide rigorously formulated predictions and quantitative data to the structural analysis of language.

  PublisherDOI

• Another model not for the learning of language

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022-07-05 · 2 citations

  letterOpen accessSenior author

  Microbial communities are found throughout the biosphere, from human guts to glaciers, from soil to activated sludge. Understanding the statistical properties of such diverse communities can pave the way to elucidate the common mechanisms ...Multiple ecological forces act together to shape the composition of microbial communities. Phyloecology approaches—which combine phylogenetic relationships between species with community ecology—have the potential to disentangle such forces but are often ...

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julie Anne Legate

  15 shared

• David Pesetsky

  10 shared

• Jordan Kodner

  8 shared

• Sarah R. Payne

  7 shared

• Erwin Chan

  7 shared

• Deniz Beser

  6 shared

• Mitchell P. Marcus

  Philadelphia University

  5 shared

• Jacob A Lichtefeld

  4 shared

Labs

• Department of Linguistics, University of PennsylvaniaPI

Education

• Ph.D., Language acquisition, language change, computational linguistics, morphology, psycholinguistics

  MIT

  2000

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