Peter Blouw
PhD Student
Bio
I am a PhD student in the UW Department of Philosophy. I received my BA in English Literature from the University of Guelph (2010), and my MA in philosophy from the University of Waterloo (2011).
Research
My research in the CNRG focuses on various aspects of language processing. Currently, I am working on incorporating multi-word expressions into distributed models of semantics. These models work well for representing the meanings of individual words, but they have not yet been successfully extended to account for the representation of more complex expressions as such word pairs, simple phrases, and sentences. The well-known theoretical challenge associated with this project is to understand how the meanings of complex expressions are related to both the meanings of their constituent parts and the way in which these parts have been combined. The more practical challenge is to develop models that can perform interesting semantic tasks, and at the same time, be integrated with the work being done by other members of the lab.
My other interests include theories of mental representation, theories of concepts, and more broadly, philosophical work in the areas of mind, language, and logic.
Publications
Theses
- (2017) Inferential Role Semantics for Natural Language. PhD thesis, University of Waterloo. Abstract PDF External link
- (2011) A Dynamic Account of the Structure of Concepts. Master's thesis, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON. Abstract PDF
Journal Articles
- (2021) Simulating and Predicting Dynamical Systems With Spatial Semantic Pointers. Neural Computation, 33(8):2033-2067. Abstract PDF DOI
- (2018) Using neural networks to generate inferential roles for natural language. Frontiers in Psychology, pages 1-14. Abstract PDF DOI
- (2016) Concepts as semantic pointers: A framework and computational model. Cognitive Science, 40(5):1128–1162. Abstract PDF DOI
Conference and Workshop Papers
- (2021) Hardware Aware Training for Efficient Keyword Spotting on General Purpose and Specialized Hardware. In TinyML Research Symposium. Abstract arXiv
- (2020) Event-Driven Signal Processing with Neuromorphic Computing Systems. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). Abstract External link
- (2019) Predicting vehicle behaviour using LSTMs and a vector power representation for spatial positions. In European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, 113–118. ESANN. Abstract PDF
- (2017) Inferential Role Semantics for Natural Language. In Thora Tenbrink, Glenn Gunzelmann, Andrew Howes and Eddy Davelaar, editors, Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 142–147. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF External link
- (2016) Modeling motor planning in speech production using the Neural Engineering Framework. In Electronic Speech Signal Processing (ESSV), 15–22. Abstract PDF
- (2016) A scaleable spiking neural model of action planning. In Anna Papafragou Dan Grodner, Dan Mirman and John Trueswell, editors, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1583–1588. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF External link
- (2015) Constraint-based parsing with distributed representations. In 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 238–243. Abstract PDF
- (2015) Explorations in Distributed Recurrent Biological Parsing. In International Conference on Cognitive Modelling. Abstract PDF
- (2013) A Neurally Plausible Encoding of Word Order Information into a Semantic Vector Space. In 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1905–1910. Abstract PDF Poster
- (2013) A Neural Model of Human Image Categorization. In 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 633–638. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF