It is our great pleasure to share with you the wonderful news that Professor Emeritus and former Provost and Vice Chancellor Jim Staros has created with the University a new endowment fund to honor his wife, Professor Emerita Alice Harris, that will support summer research fellowships for graduate and undergraduate linguistics students.

When fully endowed, the Alice Carmichael Harris Summer Research Fellowship Fund will provide service-free summer stipends for Harris Fellows, who will be selected from among the current graduate PhD students and undergraduate majors. Reflecting the nature of Professor Harris’s own research, preference will be given to students engaging in fieldwork or experimental research, but students working in any area of linguistics may be appointed Harris Fellows.

While the fund is now open for contributions from any donors, Jim has made the fund the sole beneficiary of his IRA, which is currently valued at more than $300,000, as a bequest to fully endow the fund. In the meantime, Jim and Alice are also already building the fund through smaller annual contributions.

To celebrate the creation of this fund, the Linguistics Department will on December 12th be offering a toast to both Jim and Alice for this incredibly generous gift. If you’d like to attend, please email Department Chair Seth Cable. In the meantime, please join us in thanking Jim and Alice for creating this new fund.

We’re thrilled to share the news that Joe Pater has been selected as one of this year’s UMass Spotlight Scholars. Spotlight Scholars “are individual faculty members who exemplify the quality and commitment of the UMass Amherst faculty”.

As a Spotlight Scholar, Joe and his research have been featured in an article posted on the UMass website, at the link below:

• https://www.umass.edu/gateway/research/stories/spotlight-scholars/joe-pater

Please join us in congratulating Joe on this excellent, campus-wide recognition!

We’re delighted to share the news that Dr. Magda Oiry has been selected to serve as one of this year’s UMass ADVANCE Faculty Fellows.

As an ADVANCE Faculty Fellow, Magda will “provide recommendations and feedback about priorities to the UMass ADVANCE leadership team and liaise with their departments to promote ADVANCE programs and tools,” including informing ADVANCE about successful equity and inclusion initiatives in Linguistics. 

Magda previously served as an ADVANCE Faculty Fellow in 2023-2024, and was succeeded in our department by Professor Rajesh Bhatt in 2024-2025.

Please join us in congratulating Magda, as well as thanking Rajesh for his service in the past year!

Please join us in congratulating Joe Pater for being selected as one of this year’s Faculty Fellows in the UMass Public Interest Technology Initiative (PIT@UMass).

The focus of PIT@UMass is the development and realization of socially responsible solutions to the challenges of a technology-driven world. The associated faculty fellowship program provides both community and support for public interest-focused, interdisciplinary, tech-enabled UMass pedagogy and research. PIT Fellowship cohorts from across campus get to know one another and support one another’s research and teaching, creating a fertile, creative, interdisciplinary environment in which to expand their work both in depth and breadth. This year’s theme is Responsible AI.

Joe’s fellowship will help him advance his collaborative research with Virginia Partridge of the Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. They are developing a method for automatic transcription into the International Phonetic Alphabet, which leverages the technology underlying modern speech recognition systems. He will also collaborate with other fellows in working to “create, use, and manage AI responsibly to promote the public interest.”

Congratulations, Joe!

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!