Shortly after the UMass Linguistics 50th anniversary reunion, Elan Dresher (PhD 1978) sent Gaja Jarosz and Joe Pater this history of his work on learning of parameter settings for stress.

It occurred to me that work on computational learning theories for metrical phonology has an even older connection to UMass Linguistics than anyone knows except me. So you might be interested in this story, which I pass on to you, as the keepers of UMass Linguistics history.

My first job after I left UMass was at Brown, and I remained in touch with Jean-Roger Vergnaud, who had been at UMass when I was a student there and was a mentor who helped me a lot in my time there. Jean-Roger suggested that we put in for an NSF grant to develop a computational learning model for metrical phonology, which we did sometime around 1980. We were unsuccessful, and I vividly remember the comments of one of the reviewers. The reviewer wrote that the project we were proposing was a logical next step that combined parametric metrical theory with thinking about learnability. Indeed, it was such an obvious thing to do that there was no need to fund us! It is inevitable, the reviewer went on, that someone, maybe several people, would come up with the exact same idea and would do it with or without a grant. 

Some years later, around 1983, I had moved to Ottawa and began working with Jonathan Kaye. He, too, was in touch with Jean-Roger (cf. the early work on Government Phonology), and J-R told him about our unsuccessful grant proposal. Jonathan suggested that we put in for the same project to SSHRC, and this application was successful. We both went out and bought Rainbow 100 computers, did a crash course in PROLOG with Peter Roosen-Runge, a computer scientist and friend of Jonathan who was a Co-PI on the grant, and the result was the project we reported on in our paper in Cognition (1990). This was, to my knowledge, the first computer program that attempted to learn metrical stress. Contrary to the prediction of the NSF reviewer, nobody else had come up with this obvious project in the meantime.

Delattre and Freeman’s (1968) “A dialect study of American r’s by x-ray motion picture” is a groundbreaking phonetics study that documents variation in the articulation of American English “r”; now famously, the tongue can be either bunched or retroflexed. I asked Don about how this collaboration arose, and he shared these recollections. (Joe Pater).

Pierre Delattre was one of my many mentors, for all of whom I am very grateful. I arrived at my first job as the English-language person at UC Santa Barbara, only to realize that although I’d had a fair amount of graduate coursework in EL (Old English, Old Norse, Middle High German, History and Structure of English) in the course of my English (not linguistics; very few existed then [1965]) Ph.D., I really had had no systematic training in linguistics. Pierre ran a big phonetics lab at UCSB and I just went over there and worked with him. He was very kind and generous with his time and ideas, and without my asking put my name as joint author on the paper I had worked on that came out of that lab. He encouraged me to apply for (and recommended me for) one of the summer-study grants that the UC system had for young faculty, which sent me to UCLA for the 1966 summer Linguistic Institute where I encountered Noam. Noam, in turn, after the summer was over, encouraged me to apply for (and recommended me for) an NSF fellowship to go to MIT for a year. When I got it, everyone in English was much chuffed at the fact that the National *Science* Foundation had awarded a postdoc to an assistant professor of *English*, but I, even then being aware of the clout Noam had in the fellowship world, wasn’t. I knew it was more about Noam than about me. At MIT I worked mostly with Morris Halle, who in turn recommended me first for my UMass job in English, and then when they were thinking of letting me start a linguistics department (there was a moribund program in place), intervened in my behalf for that as well and gave me a ton of invaluable advice in the early going. So my early career was sort of a handoff-handoff-handoff. But it all started with Pierre, really. He had a very nice house in a fancy part of Santa Barbara (Hope Ranch, down by the ocean), and I played tennis with him on his court there. Not long after I left he dropped dead on that court at age 67 while playing with his family. Amazing guy.

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.” 

The Department of Linguistics is now offering a Linguistics and Data Science Certificate. This is a 5 course undergraduate certificate that provides a foundation in linguistics, quantitative methods and programming, and builds on it within the study of human language and language technology. Students develop programing skills, understanding of basic formal foundations (e.g. formal language theory and probability theory), and applications in language technology and in the study of human linguistic knowledge. The full curriculum is below.

As the first programming course, students can also elect to take Ling 190D Data Science for Linguistics, which is being offered online in the Fall and Spring of the 24-25 academic year.

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Curriculum for Data Science and Linguistics Certificate

The first two courses to be completed are an introduction to Linguistics, and an introduction to programming

1. Linguist 201: How Language Works: Introduction to Linguistic Theory

2. One of CICS 108, 110, or COMPSCI119

CICS/STATISTC 108: Foundations of Data Science CICS 110: Foundations of Programming
COMPSCI 119: Introduction to Programming with Python

Information on these introductory programming courses can be found at: https://www.cics.umass.edu/content/intro-programming.

Ling 201 and the programming course are prerequisites for Ling 409, which is itself a prerequisite for Ling 429

3. LINGUIST 409 Introduction to Computational Linguistics

4. LINGUIST 429H Advanced Computational Linguistics

5. An elective in quantitative linguistics or in statistics. One of the following courses, or another course at the 300-level or above approved by the Certificate director:

ANTHRO 281 Statistics in Anthropology Using R

PSYCH 240 Statistics in Psychology

STAT 240 Introduction to Statistics

LING 394 Language and Cognition

LING 412 Language processing and the brain

LING 414 Introduction to phonetics for linguists

Seth Cable will be the Chair of our Department starting on September 1st. Thank you Seth for taking on this position – we look forward to working with you in this new role.

The 31st meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association was held here at UMass Amherst June 12-13th, with the support of an NSF conference grant. Thank you to the organizers, Kristine Yu, Jed Guevara and Alessa Farinella for all their hard work, as well as to Narda Wakoluk for logistic support, and congratulations on such a successful meeting!

María Biezma, who holds a joint position between our department and Spanish and Portuguese Studies, has been awarded tenure and has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.

Congratulations María on this well-deserved recognition of your work!

Michael Wagner of McGill University will be presenting a talk on “Syntactic Alternative Projection” in our departmental colloquium series, Friday April 26th at 3:30 in ILC S11. All are welcome! An abstract follows

Abstract. Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative meanings can then compose pointwise, and play a crucial role in explaining contextual effects on prosodic prominence, and but also constrain scalar implicature, focus association, and related phenomena. This talk presents evidence that prosodic focus in fact relies on a syntactic mechanism of alternative generation. Focused constituents introduce a set of alternative expressions, which then ‘project’ in a pointwise way in syntax to generate sets of larger alternative expressions. Syntactic alternative projection sheds new light on a number of oddball phenomena, such as focus below the word level, metalinguistic uses of focus, expletive insertion within words, and echo questions (building the pioneering work on these phenomena by Arstein (2002)). The analysis also raises new questions, however, about the architecture of grammar, since it relies on a syntax in which structural pieces are inserted early, before they are infused with syntactic features and meaning.

The Board of Higher Education has approved a Computational Linguistics major that will be offered by our department, in collaboration with the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences. Current students will be able to transfer into the major in Fall of 2024, and it will be included in the common application in the Fall of 2025. The curriculum can be found here. Special thanks to Rajesh Bhatt and Kristine Yu for all of their work on this initiative, as well as our colleagues in CICS for their collaboration on it.

Update: We have temporarily taken this website off line. Please e-mail linguist@umass.edu with any questions.