Please join us in congratulating Joe Pater for being selected as one of this year’s Faculty Fellows in the UMass Public Interest Technology Initiative (PIT@UMass).

The focus of PIT@UMass is the development and realization of socially responsible solutions to the challenges of a technology-driven world. The associated faculty fellowship program provides both community and support for public interest-focused, interdisciplinary, tech-enabled UMass pedagogy and research. PIT Fellowship cohorts from across campus get to know one another and support one another’s research and teaching, creating a fertile, creative, interdisciplinary environment in which to expand their work both in depth and breadth. This year’s theme is Responsible AI.

Joe’s fellowship will help him advance his collaborative research with Virginia Partridge of the Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. They are developing a method for automatic transcription into the International Phonetic Alphabet, which leverages the technology underlying modern speech recognition systems. He will also collaborate with other fellows in working to “create, use, and manage AI responsibly to promote the public interest.”

Congratulations, Joe!

Please join us in congratulating our colleague Professor Brendan O’Connor (CICS) and his collaborator Ina Ganguli (Economics) on being awarded one of this year’s 21 ‘SPARC’ Seed Grants.

Their project, “Leveraging Innovations in Natural Language Processing to Analyze Union Contracts and Academic Labor Markets,” will combine labor economics and natural language processing, by collecting a corpus of graduate student union contracts and analyzing them with NLP methods to extract key contractual terms (e.g., wages and benefits). These legal texts pose significant linguistic challenges due to highly technical language, complex embedded clauses, deontic modality (Ash et al. 2020), etc. To address these unique challenges, the project will develop and apply large language model-based methods with manual validation.

Congratulations are in order for Michael Wilson, who has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in Computational Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Reno!

Michael completed his PhD in 2021 with a thesis entitled The Syntactic and Semantic Atoms of the Spray/load Alternation. After leaving UMass, he went to work with Bob Frank at Yale, studying patterns of syntactic acquisition and generalization in neural language models; Following that, Michael taught in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. At UNR, Michael will contribute to the new BA in Computational Linguistics and continue his research at the interface of linguistic theory, computational linguistics, and language acquisition and processing.

Rajesh Bhatt is participating in the workshop “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Interpreting Bare Arguments” at Nantes University on May 12-13. The title of Rajesh’s talk is “Subject pseudo-incorporation and possible semantic consequences in Hindi-Urdu” and you can find the slides HERE. The workshop celebrates Veneeta Dayal’s forthcoming book: The Open Handbook of (In)definiteness: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Interpreting Bare Arguments

Seung-Suk Josh Lee will start a post-doc in September at McGill University in Montreal. He will be working with Morgan Sonderegger and Meghan Clayards. Congratulations, Josh!

Mariana Calderón presented at the Xth Conference on Otomanguean and neighboring languages (COLOV X) held in Oaxaca, Mexico on May 4. The title of Mariana’s presentation was Voz pasiva y sincretismo de voz en el zapoteco de San Pablo Güilá (Passive voice and voice syncretism in SPGüilá Zapotec)

Presentations from UMassers from the past!
Ana Alonso (Fieldmethods linguistic informant ’17, PhD SpanPort): Recursos retóricos en la memoria oral sobre la llegada del agua en Villa Hidalgo Yalálag.

Fidel Hernández (visitor): Dominios prosódicos en el triqui de Chicahuaxtla

The 35th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference will take place at Harvard University on May 20-22. UMassers past and present will be making presentations of all sorts.

Of note, our very own Ana Arregui and alumnus Florian Schwarz will both be giving invited presentations. Congratulations Ana and Florian!

Ana’s invited presentation is entitled Revisiting at least and at most.

Florian’s invited presentation is entitled Fun filtering facts, if not presupposition projection.

In addition, other UMass Semanticists on the program are:

María Biezma: Understanding the je ne sais quoi of mock language

Deniz Özyıldız and Maribel Romero (with Ciyang Qing and Wataru Uegaki): Wondering hopefully and fearfully: How do desires and inquisitive attitudes interact?

You can see the full conference program HERE.

Here are some photos of Mariam Asatryam and Yosho Miyata from WCCFL 2025! Read more about their presentations HERE.

The 61st meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS61) takes place at the University of Chicago May 9-11. The program includes presentations from some of our current graduate students:

Özge Bakay: An experimental investigation of conjunct
agreement in Turkish

Alessa Farinella: Givenness and default prosody

Satoru Ozaki: Japanese accusative/ablative alternation verbs are unaccusative.

You can see the full program HERE