Bilingual minds, bilingual machines March 1, 2013 - March 31, 2013

The young human brain copes remarkably well with two or more languages, with early bilingualism often resulting in perfect parallel proficiency. In contrast, automatic translation and language recognition systems remain suboptimal, despite powerful computing resources, large-scale corpora and increasingly sophisticated training algorithms.
The summer school is a unique opportunity for postgraduate students and early-career researchers in psychology and computer science to engage over common issues informed by both disciplines. How can we model bilingual processing? How are two phonologies represented? How is meaning related to word forms? How far can meanings be shared between languages in the human mind and in machines?