Below is information about some recent work by Ali Nirheche (with short descriptions by Ali).

Momayiz, Imane., Outchakoucht, Aissam., Choukrani, Omar., & Nirheche, Ali. (2024). TerjamaBench: A culturally specific dataset for evaluating translation models for Moroccan Darija. AtlasIA. Published on Hugging Face (machine learning and data science platform)

• “What we did is we compared prominent AI models (GPT4o, Claude 3.5 sonnet, Gemini) as well as few models that my colleagues have worked on for Moroccan Arabic (e.g., Terjman-Large-v1.2). We compared the performance of these models with respect to Moroccan Arabic (how well their output resembles how Moroccan Arabic is actually used).”

Nirheche, Ali. (2025). Moroccan Arabic Plurals Corpus [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14642330

• “This is a corpus of Moroccan Arabic plural that I published back in January. The corpus contains 1,166 singular-plural noun pairs in Moroccan Arabic.”

Nirheche, Ali. 2024. Shiny App for MaxEnt with Hidden Structure. Shiny Application. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Amherst. https://alingwist.shinyapps.io/HGR_app/

• “This is a user-friendly Shiny application, MaxEnt with Hidden Structure in R, that I developed. It’s designed to assist linguists in generating phonological grammars (weights) using a Maximum Entropy model.” (more info about the project here, funded by NSF grant with PI Joe Pater).

February 28 2025
Or and any and modals and quantifiers

Friday 21 2025
Assertion, Presupposition and Local Accommodation

This year’s iteration of the Southern New England Workshop on Semantics (SNEWS) took place at MIT on November 23. You can find the program and abstracts here. Below is a list of presentations from UMass graduate students:

Shaunak Phadnis: Negative meaning without negation: Case of bara in Marathi

Jia Ren: The semantics of stressed `and’

Carla Spellerberg:  What’s inside a noun? Exploring nominal event arguments with skillful-type adjectives 

Alex Krauska joins our department this year as a post-doc. We asked her to tell us a little bit about herself:
“I am interested in psycho- and neuro-linguistics, morphosyntax, and acquired language disorders. I did my PhD at the University of Maryland, where I worked on bridging the gaps between morphosyntactic theory and models of language production. My dissertation, “A World Without Words: a non-lexicalist framework for psycho- and neuro-linguistics”, outlines the issues with models that rely on words or lemmas as a unit of language production, and describes a non-lexicalist, non-semiotic alternative. In my spare time, I play music, hike, and care for a variety of houseplants.”

A workshop in honor of Janet Dean Fodor was held at the start of this year’s Human Sentence Processing Conference (May 15), including participation by Lyn Frazier. Recordings of the workshop are available here.

Below is a picture of some past and current UMassers at this year’s Sinn und Bedeutung conference. For complete information about current students presenting at Sinn und Bedeutung, take a look at THIS POST.

Umass was well-represented in the 19th Conference on laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 19), which took place in Seoul, June 27-29.

Posters:
Alessa Farinella and Seung Suk (Josh) Lee: The perception of tonal and perceptual cues to phrasing in Seoul Korean.
Cerys Hughes: Interaction of voicing cues in discrimination differences from preoduction.
Seung Suk (Josh) Lee: Prosodically conditioned lenition, not voicing,
of lenis obstruents in Seoul Korean spontaneous speech.
Kristine Yu and Alessa Farinella: Variability in the prosodic realization of remote past in African American English.

Corpus Phon:
Seung Suk (Josh) Lee talk: Predictability and phonological context interact in conditioning the acoustic reduction of Seoul Korean lenis obstruents

Undergraduates William Kezerian, Lam An Wyner, Sandro Ansari, together with Kristine Yu presented a paper called “Ye Olde French: Effect of Old and Middle French on SIGMORPHON-UniMorph Shared Task Data” at The 21st SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, in June 2024 in Mexico City. The paper developed from work carried out in Linguist 409: Introduction to Computational Linguistics. Congratulations!

Kristine Yu was an invited plenary speaker at Speech Prosody 2024 at Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands on July 5, 2024. She gave the talk: The obligatory boundary tone hypothesis and prosodic typology ( talk slides and a related proceedings paper).

 Alessa Farinella and Kristine co-presented a poster called “Prosodic variability in marking remote past in African American English” (poster linked) (the proceedings paper is here).