Joe Pater writes:
John McCarthy and I are very pleased to be able to announce that the NSF has awarded a grant of $305,613 to support a project entitled “Computing constraint-based derivations: Phonological opacity and hidden structure learning”, starting September 1, 2014, and lasting for 3 years. John and I will direct the grant, and the other senior personnel will be Robert Staubs (UMass) and Mark Johnson (Macquarie). The grant will support a graduate student RA, and also includes a Research Experience for Undergraduates component that will involve two undergraduates every semester. This coming semester, Presley Pizzo will be an RA on the grant, and Amanda Doucette and Stephanie Rich will participate in the REU program. All are welcome to participate in grant activities, including our weekly meetings which will take place at 10 am Thursdays this semester. We will announce grant meetings on the ling-phonology mailing list (https://list.umass.edu/mailman/listinfo/ling-phonology). Students interested in future RA-ships or the REU program are especially encouraged to attend grant meetings, and also to talk with John or me.
The project plans include the creation of a publicly accessible database on instances of phonological opacity, development of accounts of opacity in Harmonic Serialism and comparison with other approaches, implementation of computational tools for working with derivational versions of OT and Harmonic Grammar ("OT-Help 3"), and research on the learning of hidden structure in a Maximum Entropy framework, including learning of derivations (the goals of the project will undoubtedly evolve as we pursue this collaborative work).
