Category Archives: Uncategorized

Vasishth in linguistics colloquium Friday 9/25 at 3:30

Shravan Vasishth (Potsdom) will give a colloquium talk in linguistics on 9/25 at 3:30. Below is the abstract and zoom information.

———— Abstract————
Twenty years of retrieval models
Shravan Vasishth (vasishth.github.io)

After Newell wrote his 1973 article, “You can’t play twenty questions
with nature and win”, several important cognitive architectures
emerged for modeling human cognitive processes across a wide range of
phenomena. One of these, ACT-R, has played an important role in the
study of memory processes in sentence processing. In this talk, I
will talk about some important lessons I have learnt over the last 20
years while trying to evaluate ACT-R based computational models of
sentence comprehension. In this connection, I will present some new
results from a recent set of sentence processing studies on Eastern
Armenian.

Reference:
Shravan Vasishth and Felix Engelmann. Sentence comprehension as a
cognitive process: A computational approach. 2021. Cambridge
University Press.
https://vasishth.github.io/RetrievalModels/

———-Zoom Invitation—————
Sep 25, 2020 03:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUldemurz4oGdAo6hV69nh4k3y82zRiLVZB

White in Cognitive Brown bag Thurs 9/9 at noon

Alex White will give a talk on visual word recognition in Cognitive Brown bag over zoom on Thursday, 9/9 at noon. Below is the abstract and zoom information. Everyone is welcome!

A bottleneck for visual word recognition in brain and behavior

Reading is a demanding task, constrained by inherent processing capacity limits. Do those capacity limits allow for multiple words to be recognized in parallel? I will first present a series of behavioral experiments that measured accuracy for recognizing briefly flashed and masked words. The question is: when given the amount of time required to recognize one word, can people divide attention and recognize two words simultaneously?  We consistently found that accuracy was so impaired that it supported a serial processing model: on each trial, subjects could recognize one word but had to guess about the other. We concluded that a fundamental bottleneck allows only one word to be fully processed at a time. I will then present a neuroimaging study designed to identify the source of that bottleneck, focusing on two sub-regions of the “visual word form area,” a critical component of the brain’s reading circuitry. The data suggest that the posterior sub-region can encode two words in parallel spatial channels. In contrast, activity in the anterior portion of the visual word form area is consistent with a bottleneck. Therefore, the visual system can process two words in parallel up to a relatively late stage in the recognition hierarchy. I look forward to discussion with the audience about what implications these results have for theories of reading.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/97489074821?pwd=MG9Nbk9OS1g4N3RXMVZab3duQUtSQT09

Meeting ID: 974 8907 4821
Passcode: PBScog

AMLaP conference at Potsdam 9/3-9/5

The AMLaP conference (https://amlap2020.org/), one of the largest European conferences on human language processing, will be held on 9/3-9/5 virtually. Adina Camelia Bleotu, Brian Dillon, Bethany Dickerson, and Michael Wilson, all at UMass currently or previously, will be presenting. Registration is free. Details of the program can be found on their website.

Neural networks and sentence processing reading group Mondays at 1:30-2:30pm

Brian Dillon (UMass linguistics) and Tal Linzen (NYU) are co-organizing “Neural networks and sentence processing” reading group this semester. The meeting is held weekly on Mondays from 1:30 to 2:30pm. If you are interested in being added a the mailing list, please reach out to Brian Dillon (bwdillon@umass.edu). Zoom link for the meeting follows:

https://zoom.us/my/linguistbrian

Tung in CICS Thurs. 3/12 11:45am-1:00pm

Thursday, March 12, 2020 – 11:45 to 13:00 Hsiao-Yu (Fish) Tung (Carnegie Mellon): Embodied Visual Recognition

Abstract: Current state-of-the-art CNNs can localize and name objects in internet photos, yet, they miss the basic knowledge that a two-year-old toddler has possessed: objects persist over time despite changes in the camera view, they have 3D extent, they do not 3D intersect, and so on. In this talk, I will introduce neural architectures that learn to parse video streams of a static scene into world-centric 3D feature maps by disentangling camera motion from scene appearance. I will show the proposed architectures learn object permanence, can generate RGB views from novel viewpoints in truly novel scenes, can infer affordability in sentences by grounding language in 3D visual simulations, and can learn intuitive physics in a persistent 3D feature space. Our experiments suggest that the proposed architecture is essential to generalize across objects and locations, and it overcomes many limitations of 2D CNNs.

Bio: I received my M.S. in CMU MLD and my B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2013. During my master, I worked with Professor Alex Smola on spectral method for Bayesian models and had succefully designed efficient and provable algorithms for topic modeling. In my undergraduate, I was one of the member in team “Algorithm @ National Taiwan University” led by Professor Chih-Jen Lin ‘s and we won the KDD CUP 2013 Championship on both Track1 and Track2.

About

This semester of the UMass Machine Learning and Friends Lunch (MLFL) series has been graciously sponsored by our friends at Oracle Labs.

MLFL is a lively and interactive forum held weekly where friends of the UMass Amherst machine learning community can sit down, have lunch, and give or hear a 50-minute presentation on recent machine learning research.

What is it?   A gathering of students/faculty/staff with broad interest in the methods and applications of machine learning.
When is it?    Thursdays 12:00pm to 1:00pm, unless otherwise noted. Arrive at 11:45 to get pizza.
Where is it?    CS150
Who is invited?   Everyone is welcome.
Is there food?    Yes! Pizza is provided.
Can I present?    Yes! If you would like to present your research, please email one of the organizers: Ari Kobren, Rajarshi Das, Hang Su, Samer Nashed and Aruni Roy Chowdhury

CUNY virtual conference: 3/19-3/21

The 33rd CUNY sentence processing conference, one of the largest conference on sentence processing, was planned to be take place at the UMass on 3/19-3/21. However, due to the developing coronavirus outbreak and the recommendations of the CDC and the MA Department of Public Health for large public gatherings, the conference is now going virtual! You are welcome to join the conference – see the following website for the instruction to join the conference: https://websites.umass.edu/cuny2020/.

Cognitive Science grant writing group forming

If you are writing an external grant this semester, or would like to support or learn from those who are, please consider joining the CogSci grant writing group. E-mail pater@umass.edu by the end of the day Sunday March 15th to join, or for more information. We will meet between biweekly and monthly. The primary focus will be to provide informal feedback to one and other on ideas and writing, but we may engage in more structured activities (e.g. workshops led by the staff at the research office) if there is interest.