Category Archives: Computational linguistics

UMass Linguists at the LSA Annual Meeting

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Our department was extremely well represented at this year’s Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, held in Salt Lake City Jan. 5-7 2018. Highlights included the plenary address by Lisa Green (introduced by outgoing LSA president Alice Harris), and the first meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, organized by Gaja Jarosz and Joe Pater. Rajesh Bhatt deserves special thanks for all his work as program co-chair. The photo shows just some of the current students and faculty, and alums. (Can anyone name them all? Comments open below.) The talks and posters delivered by current members of the department, including many students, are listed below (student presentations are asterisked).

*Carolyn Jane Anderson (University of Massachusetts Amherst): The San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec andative and venitive

*John Duff (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Alice Harris (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Udi and the location of Caucasian Albanian agreement clitics

*Alexander Goebel (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Lyn Frazier (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Investigating the parallelism requirement of too

Lisa Green (University of Massachusetts Amherst), “African American English and Fifty Years of Research: Variation, Development, and Implications for the Pipelines”

*Coral Hughto (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Investigating the consequences of iterated learning in phonological typology

*Kimberly Johnson (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Expletive voice: another look at the Creek causative

*Andrew Lamont (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Subsequential steps to unbounded tonal plateauing

Joe Pater (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Lisa Sanders (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Evan Hare (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Claire Moore-Cantwell (Simon Fraser University): ERP signatures of implicit and explicit phonological learning

*Brandon Prickett (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Similarity-based phonological generalization

Tom Roeper (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Bart Hollebrandse (University of Groningen), Ana Perez (University of Toronto), Angeliek van Hout (University of Groningen), Petra Schulz (Goethe University Frankfurt), Anca Sevcenco (University of Bucharest): Avoidance by children as evidence of self-embedding recursion

*Katerina A. Tetzloff (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Analyzing surface unnaturalness and opacity in phonetically natural steps: final devoicing and vowel lengthening in Friulian

Upcoming Computational Linguistics Community Events

Please join us for two upcoming CLC events!

  • Students in Cognitive Modeling (Ling 692c) present their final projects
    • Dec 8, 9-10am in ILC N400 (Psycholinguistics Workshop)
    • Students will give 5 minute presentations about their final class projects involving computational modeling of some psycholinguistic task or phenomenon
  • Students in Intro NLP (CS 585) give poster presentations of their final projects
    • Dec 12, 3:30-5pm (session 1) and 5-6:30 (session 2), in CS room 150/151
    • See description below from Brendan O’Connor

CS 585 Poster Sessions

Come check out 80+ poster presentations for natural language processing class projects this semester!  A sampling of topics include:
 – Movie revenue prediction using plot summary analysis
 – Irony detection in English tweets
 – Determining toxicity in social discussions
 – Cross-lingual transfer learning for Hindi part-of-speech tagging
There will be two sessions, both in CS room 150/151:
  – Session 1: 3:30-5:00
  – Session 2: 5:00-6:30
There will be different posters at each session, so come early and often!

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

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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).