Paul Smolensky (born May 5, 1955) is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science at the

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

and a Senior Principal Researcher at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

, Redmond Washington. Along with

Alan Prince Alan Sanford Prince (born 1946) is a Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Prince, along with Paul Smolensky, developed Optimality Theory, which was originally applied to phonology, but has be ...

, in 1993 he developed

Optimality Theory In linguistics, Optimality Theory (frequently abbreviated OT) is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints. OT differs from other approaches to phonological ...

, a grammar formalism providing a formal theory of cross-

linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...

(or

Universal Grammar Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible hum ...

) within

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

. Optimality Theory is popularly used for

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

, the subfield to which it was originally applied, but has been extended to other areas of linguistics such as

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

and

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...

. Smolensky is the recipient of the 2005

Rumelhart Prize The David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition was founded in 2001 in honor of the cognitive scientist David Rumelhart to introduce the equivalent of a Nobel prize for cognitive science. It is a ...

for his development of the ICS Architecture, a model of cognition that aims to unify

connectionism Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial in ...

and

symbolism Symbolism or symbolist may refer to: Arts * Symbolism (arts), a 19th-century movement rejecting Realism ** Symbolist movement in Romania, symbolist literature and visual arts in Romania during the late 19th and early 20th centuries ** Russian sy ...

, where the symbolic representations and operations are manifested as abstractions on the underlying connectionist or

artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

. This architecture rests on

Tensor Product In mathematics, the tensor product V \otimes W of two vector spaces and (over the same field) is a vector space to which is associated a bilinear map V\times W \to V\otimes W that maps a pair (v,w),\ v\in V, w\in W to an element of V \otimes W ...

Representations, compositional embeddings of symbolic structures in vector spaces. It encompasses the Harmonic Grammar framework, a connectionist-based numerical grammar formalism he developed with Géraldine Legendre and Yoshiro Miyata, which was the predecessor of

. The ICS Architecture builds on Harmony Theory, a formalism for

artificial neural network Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

s that introduced the

restricted Boltzmann machine A restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a generative stochastic artificial neural network that can learn a probability distribution over its set of inputs. RBMs were initially invented under the name Harmonium by Paul Smolensky in 1986, and rose ...

architecture. This work, up through the early 2000s, is presented in the two-volume book written with Géraldine Legendre, ''The Harmonic Mind''. Subsequent work introduced ''Gradient Symbolic Computation'', in which blends of partially-activated symbols occupy blends of positions in discrete structures such as trees or graphs. This has been successfully applied to numerous problems in theoretical linguistics where traditional discrete linguistic structures have proved inadequate, as well as incremental sentence processing in psycholinguistics.Cho, Pyeong Whan, Goldrick, Matthew & Smolensky, Paul. (2017). Incremental parsing in a continuous dynamical system: Sentence processing in Gradient Symbolic Computation. ''Linguistics Vanguard'', 3, 1. In work with colleagues at Microsoft Research and Johns Hopkins, Gradient Symbolic Computation has been embedded in neural networks using deep learning to address a range of problems in reasoning and natural language processing. Among his other important contributions is the notion of local conjunction of linguistic constraints, in which two constraints combine into a single stronger constraint that is violated only when both of its conjuncts are violated within the same specified local domain. Local conjunction has been applied to the analysis of various "super-additive" effects in Optimality Theory. With Bruce Tesar (

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

), Smolensky has also contributed significantly to the study of the learnability of Optimality Theoretic grammars (in the sense of

computational learning theory In computer science, computational learning theory (or just learning theory) is a subfield of artificial intelligence devoted to studying the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms. Overview Theoretical results in machine learning m ...

). Smolensky was a founding member of the

Parallel Distributed Processing Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial in ...

research group at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

, and is currently a member of the

Center for Language and Speech Processing Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

and of the Deep Learning Group at

, Redmond Washington.

References

External links

Paul Smolensky Homepage at Johns Hopkins

Paul Smolensky Homepage at Microsoft Research

David E. Rumelhart Prize
{{DEFAULTSORT:Smolensky, Paul 1955 births Harvard University alumni Indiana University alumni Living people Linguists from the United States American phonologists Johns Hopkins University faculty Rumelhart Prize laureates Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society