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.

UMass Linguistics will be participating in this year’s UMassGives donation drive, on April 29th and 30th. Moreover, this year, our special focus will be on gifts to support student research, particularly the research work of our undergraduate majors.

To find out more, please check out our departmental UMassGives page below:

https://umass.scalefunder.com/gday/giving-day/98035/department/98154

As stated there, our undergraduate major has over the past 10 years grown beyond what many could have ever imagined, drawing in exceptionally talented students from not only Massachusetts, but also from beyond the Commonwealth and even the US. Our majors form a critically important part of our intellectual community, and they’ve been increasingly successful in producing innovative research that is being accepted into major national and international conferences. We’re therefore very grateful for any assistance that donors can give to help us provide some funding support for student research – both grad and undergrad – and conference travel.

We’re also hoping that others can help spread the word of this to their own contacts and on social media. If you’d like to find out more, please contact Seth Cable.

Please join us in congratulating Professor Rajesh Bhatt, who is one of the recipients of the 2025 UMass Distinguished Teaching Award.

This highly competitive award is in recognition of Bhatt’s many extraordinary contributions to teaching on campus over his career. In addition to a monetary award of $3500, Bhatt’s name will be included permanently on the Distinguished Teaching Award Display in the Integrative Learning Center.

As stated in the letter sent announcing the award, “Our campus advances toward our highest ideals through your hard work.”

Congratulations, Rajesh!

Please join us in celebrating the wonderful news that Professor Brian Dillon has been selected as one of this year’s three recipients of the prestigious Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship Awards.

In addition to being specially recognized for the excellence of his research, Professor Dillon will receive a one-year release from all teaching and service duties. This will allow him to devote his creative energies to an exciting research project with Tal Linzen (NYU), investigating and deepening our understanding of how Large Language Models differ from humans in how they resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguity.

In his selection for the Conti Fellowship, Professor Dillon joins the ranks of previous illustrious Conti Fellows in our department, such as Lisa Green (2017), Peggy Speas (2006), Angelika Kratzer (1999), John McCarthy (1997), Lyn Frazier (1993), Lisa Selkirk (1991), Tom Roeper (1989), Emmon Bach (1982), and Barbara Partee, who was among the very first Conti Fellows in 1981.

Congratulations, Brian!

Please join us in congratulating UMass alum Andries Coetzee for being named the Judith T. Irvine Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan.

Professor Coetzee graduated the UMass Linguistics PhD program in 2004, and he joined the University of Michigan Department of Linguistics in the same year. From his own message on Facebook announcing this honor:

“As I start my 21st year as a professor at University of Michigan, it will be as the Judith T. Irvine Collegiate Professor of Linguistics. Being named as a collegiate professor is a recognition that Michigan bestows on senior faculty for sustained contributions across all aspects of the profession. But here is what makes it particularly interesting and special: When awarded a collegiate professorship, you get to name it after a former Michigan faculty member. I chose Judy Irvine to name my professorship after. Judy is a leading thinker of 20th century linguistic anthropology. But more important to me personally, she has done significant work on the linguistic ecology of Africa, and has given African languages a prominent place at Michigan, in the US, and beyond. Judy has even done important work on South African languages. It is an honor to have her and my names connected for the rest of my career. I hope that I can continue Judy’s work of making Africa (and South Africa in particular) more visible and present on our campus and in US academia.”

Congratulations, Andries!

Please join us in congratulating Professor Michael Becker for being named one of this year’s UMass STRIDE fellows (Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence).

This will actually be Michael’s fourth year as a STRIDE Fellow, working to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in faculty recruitment.

Congratulations, Michael!