As humans, we use language with ease and speed, solving the complex computational problem of processing form and meaning seemingly without effort. This dissertation studies how the properties of language enable us to achieve this, by investigating what is computationally difficult about language, and what is easy. We first investigate the…

Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) over the past decade have largely been driven by the scale of data and computation used to train large neural network-based models. However, these techniques are inapplicable to the vast majority of the world's languages, which lack the vast digitized text datasets available for English and a few other…

Artificial intelligence revolution becomes a trend in most aspects of life. ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, has impacted various domains, including education and language learning. Enhancing writing abilities of ESL learners requires frequent writing practice and feedback, which ChatGPT can easily provide. However, ChatGPT's accuracy in identifying and…

Rumelhart and McClelland's chapter about learning the past tense created a degree of controversy extraordinary even in the adversarial culture of modern science. It also stimulated a vast amount of research that advanced the understanding of the past tense, inflectional morphology in English and other languages, the nature of linguistic…