Meet PhD student Adriana Correia

Adriana Correia started as a PhD student at the Centre for Complex Systems Studies (CCSS) on 15 March 2018. She will work under the supervision of Henk Stoof and Michael Moortgat on the subject of Compositional Distributional models of Meaning. Below she briefly introduces herself.
 

Physics in Coimbra

I come from Portugal, where I did my Bachelor's in Physics in Coimbra, and then decided to come to Utrecht to pursue a Master's degree in Theoretical Physics, because it offered me the possibility to explore several of my interests in the topic.

A complexity perspective on language

For my Master’s thesis, I studied some results of game theory on a network using a statistical physics model. The research got very interesting, and I thought that it would be great to keep working within the same framework. I started thinking about what other systems interested me, and if it would be possible to study them from a complexity perspective. 

I have always liked language and its structure, so I was thrilled to find out that it was possible to study them in complex systems, and that actually other people were already doing it! I was fortunate enough to find supervisors at the Centre for Complex Systems Studies to back me up and a project that allows me to study it in connection with physics.

The meaning of sentences

My research for the Centre will focus on studying the meaning of sentences using the individual meanings of each word, which is retrieved in vector form from big data, and all the meanings are composed to give a truth value of the sentence. We want to do that with tools that have been used in physics to explain quantum processes, because there is a nice equivalence in the formalism.

My project has two main directions. One is to try to implement the fact that quantum mechanics has complex vectors into the sentence meaning, since so far all of the vectors used are real. The other one is to explore how to describe the meaning of utterances that are not finished yet, for example “Alice loves”, which involves the dynamics of the sentence formation, and can get messy for longer sentences!

I am really excited about this project and I look forward to learn a lot and apply my physics knowledge and complexity tools on such an eclectic topic!