Category Archives: Computational linguistics

Graf colloquium Friday Nov 8 at 3:30

Thomas Graf, Stony Brook University, will present “Subregular linguistics for linguists” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday Nov 8. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

 

Abstract

Drawing from computational work that is known as the subregular program, I will argue against two received views in linguistics: “phonology and syntax are very different’ and “subcategorization is a solved problem”.

  1. Cognitive parallelism
    Subregular notions of complexity can be applied to strings as well as trees. Doing so reveals that phonology and syntax are remarkably similar (and those parallels even extend into morphology and semantics). For instance, islands and blocking effects are instances of the same computational mechanism.
  2. Subcategorization
    Subcategorization (or c-selection) is rarely studied by linguists, but it is actually a source of tremendous overgeneration. Once again subregular notions of complexity can be used to address this problem. This isn’t just a mathematical exercise, but makes concrete empirical predictions about the nature of category systems, subcategorization, the status of empty heads, the DP-analysis, DM-style roots, and once again highlights parallels to phonology.

The general upshot is that subregular concepts, despite their computational origin, are intuitive and linguistically fertile: they address conceptual issues, bridge gaps between linguistic subfields, and make concrete empirical predictions. Subregular linguistics is just linguistics with some computational flavor sprinkled on top.

Disclaimer: This talk is 100% formula-free.

Phonology/Phonetics/Psycholinguistics Guru: Matt Goldrick

This week (October 21-25) we will have a special visitor in the department, a Phonology/Phonetics/Psycholinguistics Guru, Matt Goldrick! Matt will be visiting the department all week. He will be giving two tutorials and a general talk (see below for schedule). Everyone in the department and beyond is welcome to attend all of these events.  The schedule is rather complicated so please read it carefully – all events are scheduled to take place in N400 on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week. Both tutorials are about Gradient Symbolic Representations and involve some hands-on software applications – one is focused on Phonology and the other on Processing. The talk is intended to be a general talk for the whole department. Matt is also available for individual meetings while he is here – please contact him directly about that.

SCHEDULE

Talk – “The acoustic effects of blended representations: co-production”
Tuesday 1:30-2:30

Phonology Tutorial
Gradient Harmonic Grammar (gradient underlying representations and learning models for them)
Instructions: Bring a laptop that can access the internet; you’ll be using Google Sheets to aid in calculations of harmony for candidate sets.

Monday 1:15-2:30
Wednesday 12:30-2

Psycholinguistics Tutorial
Gradient Symbolic Processing (connectionist implementations of GSR and software for generation, learning, and parsing of CFGs)

Instructions: Bring a laptop with jupyter installed (https://www.anaconda.com/distribution/). You’ll need an environment with python 3, and you should have these libraries installed: numpy, matplotlib, pickle, re.
Monday 4-5:30
Wednesday 4-5:30

Anderson to give talk at RAILS 2019

Current Ph.D. student Carolyn Anderson is presenting a paper at the Conference on Rational Approaches In Language Science conference on Saarbrücken, Germany on 10/26. Carolyn’s talk is entitled ‘Taking other perspectives into account: an RSA model of perspectival reasoning,’ and in it she will present a computational model of perspective-taking in conversation, along with production and comprehension data on the use and interpretation of perspectival motion verbs in different contexts.

The conference program can be found here:

RAILS – Program

Frank colloquium Friday Oct 11 at 3:30

Bob Frank, Yale University, will present “Inductive Bias in Language Acquisition: UG vs. Deep Learning” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Fri. Oct 11. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

Abstract: Generative approaches to language acquisition emphasize the need for language-specific inductive bias, Universal Grammar (UG), to guide learners in the face of limited data. In contrast, computational models of language learning, particularly those rooted in contemporary neural network models, have achieved high levels of performance on practical NLP tasks, largely without the imposition of any such bias.  While UG-based approaches have led to important insights into the stages and processes underlying language acquisition, they have not yielded a concrete, mechanistic model of the process by which language is learned.  At the same time, practical computational models have not been widely tested with respect to their ability to extract linguistically significant generalizations from training data. As a result the ability of such systems to face the challenges identified in the generative tradition remains unproven.  In this talk, I will review several experiments that explore the ability of network models to take on such challenges. Looking at question formation and subject-verb agreement, we find that there is considerable variety in the degree to which network architectures are capable of learning significant grammatical generalizations through gradient descent learning, suggesting that the architectures themselves may be able to impose some of the necessary bias that is often assumed to motivate the need for UG. Inadequacies remain in the generalizations acquired, however, which points to the need for hybrid models that integrate language specific information into network models.

Language and Music Workshop this Sunday May 12th

The UMass Amherst Department of Linguistics and the Department of Music and Dance, with additional support from the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute, will host a Language and Music Workshop on the afternoon of Sunday May 12th. The event will take place from noon until 5:45 in N400 in the Integrative Learning Center. Parking is free in permit lots on Sunday; the ILC is at the top corner of the pond on this map.

There are five invited speakers, and five poster presentations listed below. Please join us for lunch beforehand!

Questions? Please e-mail Joe Pater at pater@umass.edu.

Schedule

Noon – Catered lunch

1:00 Bob Ladd – University of Edinburgh

Two problems in theories of tone-melody matching (Abstract)

1:45 François Dell – Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale (CRLAO) CNRS / EHESS, Paris

Delivery design: towards a typology (Abstract)

2:30 Laura McPherson – Dartmouth College

Tonal adaptation across musical modality: A comparison of Sambla vocal music and speech surrogates (Abstract)

3:15 Poster session (see below for a list of posters)

4:15 Christopher White – University of Massachusetts Amherst

Analogies with Language in Machine-learned Musical Grammars

5:00 Mara Breen – Mount Holyoke College

The Cat in the Hat: Musical and linguistic metric structure realization in child-directed poetry (Abstract)

5:45 Goodbye.

Posters

Ellie Abrams, Laura Gwilliams, Alec Marantz (NYU, NYU Abu Dhabi)

Tracking the building blocks of pitch perception in auditory cortex (Abstract)

Kyle Marcos Allphin, Smith College ’19

Perception of Emotional Characteristics in Diatonic Chords (Abstract)

Ahren B. Fitzroy (Mount Holyoke College, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Mara Breen (Mount Holyoke College)

Implicit metric structure in aprosodic productions of The Cat in the Hat modulates auditory processing (Abstract)

Bronwen Garand-Sheridan, Yale University

Sound-symbolic semantics of pitch space (Abstract)

Emily Schwitzgebel, UMass Amherst and Will Evans, UMass Amherst

Subtle Violations in Harmonic Expectancy (Abstract)

Laura Walsh-Dickey visits UMass Linguistics

Laura Walsh-Dickey (PhD 1997) visited the Linguistics Department on Monday April 23 to talk to our PhD students about linguistics in industry – the slides from her talk can be found here: https://websites.umass.edu/linguist/files/2019/04/Linguistics-in-Industry-Laura-Dickey.pdf. Laura is a software development manager at Amazon (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauradickey)  with a wide range of experience in applications of linguistics to industry. We are very proud of her achievements, and grateful to her for this contribution to the education of our current graduate students.