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.
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?
Brandon Prickett and Andrew Lamont will be presenting papers at NECPhon 2017 at Stony Brook on October 21st. Brandon’s talk is titled “Learning biases in opaque interactions”, and Andrew’s is “Subsequential steps to unbounded tonal plateauing”. Follow the link to see the full schedule and to register (by Oct 16th).
There are several meetings of the Computational Linguistics Community (CLC) planned for the Fall 2017 semester. Please mark your calendars!
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.
This September, Alex Nazarov will take up a position as Senior Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages at the University of Huddersfield (in the UK). Congratulations Alex!
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).
Kristine Yu is one of five speakers featured in next Tuesday’s Five at Four: A cocktail reception with 5-minute talks by new and recently joined HFA Faculty hosted by Dean Julie Hayes.
Time: March 28, 4:00 to 5:00 pm.
Location: Room 168C, Campus Center.
Amanda Doucette will be presenting her undergraduate honor’s thesis work at the 2017 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics in Valencia Spain on April 3rd. Her proceedings paper “Inherent Biases of Recurrent Neural Networks for Phonological Assimilation and Dissimilation” is available here.
