pyndl: Naïve discriminative learning in python

Abstract

The pyndl package implements Naïve Discriminative Learning (NDL) in Python. NDL is an incremental learning algorithm grounded in the principles of discrimination learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972; Widrow & Hoff, 1960) and motivated by animal and human learning research (e.g. Baayen et al., 2011; Rescorla, 1988). Lately, NDL has become a popular tool in language research to examine large corpora and vocabularies, with 750,000 spoken word tokens (Shafaei-Bajestan et al., 2022) and a vocabulary size of 52,402 word types (Sering et al., 2018). In contrast to previous implementations, pyndl allows for a broader range of analysis, including non-English languages, adds further learning rules and provides better maintainability while having the same fast processing speed. As of today, it supports multiple research groups in their work and led to several scientific publications.