My early interests were in the simulation of parameter setting via genetic algorithms. Early papers include the following:
``A Computational Model of Language Learnability and Language Change'' (with Ian Roberts), Linguistic Inquiry, 24.2, 1993, pp. 299-345.
``The Selection of Syntactic Knowledge'' Language Acquisition, 2.2, 1992, pp. 83-149.
``Finitude, Boundedness and Complexity: Learnability and the Study of First Language Acquisition''. Barbara Lust, Magui Suner & Gabriella Hermon (eds) Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Crosslinguistic Perspectives (Vol. II). Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994, pp. 473-489.
Papers on Learnability and Natural Selection, Technical Report in Formal and Computational Linguistics, No. 1, Department of Linguistics, University of Geneva, 1990.
More recently, I have become dissatisfied with the genetic algorithm approach and have begun exploring techniques based on information theory and Kolmogorov complexity:
``The automatic identification and classification of clitic pronouns'' (with Shyam Kapur) uses condition entropy in the neighborhood of known verbs to classify pronouns as free-standing or clitic.
Acquisition of clitics
A version of the above paper appears in:
``The automatic construction of a symbolic parser via statistical techniques'' (with Shyam Kapur). in P. Resnik \& J. Klavans (eds) The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language. The MIT Press, 1996.
My work on complexity theory can be found in:
``Complexity and the induction of tree adjoining grammars'' explores the connections between Kolmogorov complexity and constrained induction over a base of primary trees.
Induction of TAGs
Perhaps my clearest discussion of this work is to appear in:
``Information Theory, Complexity, and Linguistics Descriptions'' in S. Bertolo (ed) Parametric Linguistics and Learnability, Cambridge University Press.
Complexity and Statistics
My most recent work is concerned with computational properties of generalized quantifiers and their acquisition.
"Learning First Order Quantifier Denotations: An essay in semantic learnability''
First Order Quantifiers