Category Archives: Newsletter

Visiting our department: Lulu Guo

Lulu Guo is visiting our department this semester (Spring 2025). You can reach Lulu here: luluguo”AT”umass.edu and lulu.guo”AT”qmul.ac.edu. Below is some information about Lulu’s research interests, as well as a link to the Department Visitors’ page:
https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/visiting-scholars

“Hello, everyone! My name is Lulu Guo and I am a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. I am currently working on the omission patterns of (Chinese) interrogative sentences. Specifically, I am trying to answer the following questions: why do certain disjunctive questions (without an overt disjunction) have different derivational mechanisms across conjuncts? Why does adding a disjunction lead to different omission patterns? And how do prosodic deletion and constituent ellipsis team up (or clash) in this whole process? Outside of academia, I enjoy going to woods, parks, museums, and various fairs. Looking forward to meeting you all!”
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/linguistics/people/research-students/profiles/guo.html

HFA + AI Lightning Talks

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the HFA Committee on AI and Emerging Technology, I’d like to invite you to a couple of upcoming events that aim to foster discussions about AI in CHFA. The meetings are open to all, and we encourage members of other colleges to join us. The talks will be 10 minutes with 5 minutes of discussion each, and then we will have 15 minutes of general discussion, followed by another half hour for informal smaller conversations. We hope these meetings will help to facilitate further conversations and future initiatives in research and teaching.

Because space is somewhat limited, we are asking participants to register in advance – please see the links below.

Best,

Joe Pater.

AI & Emerging Technology Lightning Talks 

The HFA Committee on AI and Emerging Technology will host two series of lightning talks, open to all, in which faculty will share their perspectives and research projects. 

Session 1: Friday, February 28, 11am-12:30pm, Room ILC N400. Please register to attend.  

Brian Dillon, Linguistics, “Do LLMs and humans process language in similar ways?” 

Sonja Drimmer, History of Art & Architecture. “Computer Vision and the AI Grift in Public Education” 

Chris White, Music and Dance, “Music’s challenge for AI, and AI’s Challenge for Music” 
 

Session 2: Thursday, March 13, 12-1:30pm, Tower Room, South College. Please register to attend.   

Eleonore Neufeld, Philosophy, “The Role of AI in the Philosophy of Mind: A Primer” 

Virginia Partridge, Center for Data Science, and Joe Pater, Linguistics, “AI-assisted Analysis of Phonological Variation in English” 

Emiliano Ricciardi, Music and Dance “Computational Parsing of Renaissance Poetry and Music.” 

Visiting our department: Farah Adeeba

Farah Adeeba is beginning her one-year visit to our department. Below is a small description of Farah’s research interests. You can reach Farah here: fadeeba’at’umass.edu

I am interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech Processing, and AI for low-resource languages. I did my PhD in Speech and Language Technology. In my research career, I have worked on speech-to-text, text-to-speech, speaker identification, and meeting summarization. As a Fulbright postdoc at UMass Amherst, my research explores English vs. Urdu prompt analysis, zero-shot and few-shot prompting, and the structural and semantic analysis of Roman Urdu prompts. I am also working on the development and evaluation of Urdu LLMs, with an emphasis on trustworthiness and multilingual AI. In my spare time, I enjoy music and reading books.

Visiting our department: Lucas Eberle

Here is some information about Lucas Eberle (he/him), a visitor in our Department until July 2025. You can reach Lucas here: lpereiraeber’at’umass.edu, and on the visitors’s page on the department website: https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/visiting-scholars

Hello all! My research focuses on Brazilian Portuguese morphophonology. I’m particularly interested in vowel alternations in the verbal paradigms, and I use the MaxEnt framework for my analysis. I have been doing some computational stuff too. I look forward to engaging with fellow department members on these topics and exploring new ideas together. I’ll be around until the end of July. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more about my work (Brazilian Portuguese is fun, I promise).

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Faruk Akkuş gives three talks in Germany

On 1/21, Faruk gave a colloquium talk at the Oberseminar English Linguistics at the University of Göttingen. The talk was titled “Causatives as a window into the semantic denotations and morphology of passives”.

Faruk was a speaker at the workshop “Cause(e/r): The Interplay between Event Structure and Argument Realization”, held at University of Cologne on 1/23 – 1/24. His presentation was titled “Implications of causatives for the semantic denotations and morphology of passives”

Faruk’s final colloquium talk was at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf on 1/28, titled “Properties of trilingual word-internal code-switching”

Joe Pater on the “Fabulous 413”

Joe Pater appeared on the “Fabulous 413”, a show on NEPM/NPR 88.5FM that celebrates life in Western Massachusetts, on Friday Jan. 24. His appearance was in advance of his band’s show at the Rendezvous in Turner’s Falls (and includes two Dérailleurs songs played acoustically), but much of the conversation ended up being about linguistics (e.g. what is computational phonology?). The show is now available to stream on-line, including as a podcast.

https://www.nepm.org/podcast/the-fabulous-413