Category Archives: Computational linguistics

Ken Kurtz on Category Learning Friday Oct. 27 at 1:30

Kenneth Kurtz of Binghamton University will present a special talk on “The Psychology of Human Category Learning: An Overview and New Directions”. It will be held in N451 in the Integrative Learning Center, Friday Oct. 27th from 1:30 to 2:30. An abstract follows.

Abstract. I will discuss influential explanatory constructs in the psychology of human category learning including major dichotomies with regard to process (rules vs similarity, data vs theory) and representation (abstract vs concrete, distributed vs localist). Subsequently, I will present emerging approaches with an emphasis on recent modeling and behavioral results from my laboratory.

Joe Pater speaking at Indiana University

From Joe Pater

I’ll be giving two talks at Indiana University on Tuesday. The colloquium talk “Learning in typological prediction” will present joint work with Coral Hughto, Robert Staubs, and Jennifer Culbertson. I’ll speaking about to the phonetics and phonology reading group about “Structural bias in laboratory learning of phonology”, joint work with Elliott Moreton, Katya Pertsova, Claire Moore-Cantwell and Brandon Prickett.

SF Chronicle article by Andrew Wang

Andrew Wang, a UMass undergrad who has worked on linguistics research with Kyle Johnson and Tom Roeper, has published an opinion piece “A simple way users can curb the tech industry’s power”:

We have never had “Ford only” freeways or “Verizon only” phones. Why should we accept “Facebook only” instant messaging or “Skype only” video chat?

http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/A-simple-way-users-can-curb-the-tech-industry-s-12219004.php

Computational Linguistics Community Fall 2017 Meetings

There are several meetings of the Computational Linguistics Community (CLC) planned for the Fall 2017 semester. Please mark your calendars!

New paper: Generative linguistics and neural networks at 60

4 Replies

From Joe Pater

Update: Revised version posted Dec. 30, 2017.

I’ve just finished a paper, “Generative linguistics and neural networks at 60: foundation, friction, and fusion”. I’d very much welcome your comments, either publicly here as blog comments, or privately by other means. (Note that comments may require admin approval, and if so will not show up immediately). We’ll be discussing this paper in our next Computational Linguistics Community (CLiC) meeting Oct. 27th at 10 am in ILC N451.

http://people.umass.edu/pater/pater-perceptrons-and-syntactic-structures-at-60.pdf

Abstract. The birthdate of both generative linguistics and neural networks can be taken as 1957, the year of the publication of seminal work by both Noam Chomsky and Frank Rosenblatt. This paper traces the development of these two approaches to cognitive science, from their largely autonomous early development in their first thirty years, through their collision in the 1980s around the past tense debate (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986, Pinker and Prince 1988), and their integration in much subsequent work up to the present, 2017. Although these traditions are often presented as in opposition to one another, such a presentation assumes polar versions of each approach, and ignores the ever-growing body of results that have been achieved through integration.

SCiL and “Perceptrons and Syntactic Structures at 60” at the 2018 LSA

The Society for Computation in Linguistics, founded by UMass faculty Gaja Jarosz and Joe Pater, will have its inaugural meeting in conjunction with the annual meeting of LSA in Salt Lake City Jan. 4-7 2018. The call for papers is now out, with a deadline of August 1 (further details available at the link above). It will include a special session on “Perceptrons and Syntactic Structures at 60” (see the poster below for speakers), funded by an NSF conference grant to UMass (Pater PI, Brendan O’Connor of CICS co-PI).

Linguists in Undergraduate Research Conference Friday 4/28

From Brian Dillon
We’re very proud and happy to share the news that four (!!!) of our undergraduates will be presenting their research at the 23rd Annual Massachusetts Statewide Undergraduate Research Conference. The conference takes place This Friday 4/28 from 8am-5pm in the Campus Center.
There are four talks/posters from our department. If you can, please do come see what our undergraduates have gotten up to over the last year:
Vishal Sunil Arvindam (Room 163, 2:30pm – 3:15pm): Processing singular they with discrete referents: A study contrasting gender-nonconforming with gender-conforming individuals.
Amanda Doucette (Poster C71, 3:30pm – 4:15pm): Inherent biases of recurrent neural networks for phonological assimilation and dissimilation.
Jack Duff (Room 165, 8:30am – 9:15): That punk! An experiment on epithets and perspective dependence.
Emma Jane Merritt (Room 165, 8:30am – 9:15am): How does the presence of shape-based classifiers in Mandarin Chinese influence speakers’ object categorization compared to speakers of English?
The Undergraduate research conference is a venue for undergraduate research from across the state, and it’s really a great opportunity to see what folks have gotten up to both on our campus and in our sister institutions across the Bay State. In addition to talks from linguistics, there will be presentations from undergraduates working across the Cognitive Science Initiative, including Psychology and Communication Disorders. You can check out the whole schedule here:
Hope to see you there!