Gaja Jarosz has received a conference grant from the NSF to fund three special sessions at the next meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, to be held alongside the LSA annual meeting January 3-6, 2019: a plenary session on Hidden Structure in Language Learning, a special panel on “What should linguists know about Natural Language Processing  and Machine Learning?”, and tutorials for linguists on selected aspects of NLP/ML.

The first tutorial will be offered by Allyson Ettinger (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago) and will be on vector space models for syntax and semantics. The second tutorial will be offered by Kasia Hitczenko (University of Maryland) and will provide an introduction to Bayesian modeling, with an emphasis on applications in the domains of phonetics and phonology

The panelists will be Sam Bowman (Department of Linguistics and Center for Data Science, NYU), Chris Dyer (DeepMind), Allyson Ettinger (TTI), and Noah Smith (Computer Science and Engineering, Univerity of Washington). The special panel discussion will address the general topic of communication across Linguistics and NLP/ML: what misconceptions there may be on both sides, how goals and evaluative criteria may differ or overlap, what training and skills are most important for pursuing NLP/ML research or career paths, and what to expect when seeking to establish cross-disciplinary collaborative research projects.

Finally, the plenary session on hidden structure will feature talks by Gaja Jarosz, and by Mark Johnson of Macquarie University.