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 research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...

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 technolog ...

, Redmond Washington. Along with Alan Prince, in 1993 he developed Optimality Theory, 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 hu ...

) 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. Ling ...

. 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 ( constituenc ...

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, linguistics and comput ...

. 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 ...

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, 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 units ...

. 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 \otime ...

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 Optimality Theory. 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 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 land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...

), Smolensky has also contributed significantly to the study of the learnability of Optimality Theoretic grammars (in the sense of computational learning theory). Smolensky was a founding member of the Parallel Distributed Processing research group at the

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

, and is currently a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing at

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