NASSLLI 2014 Student Session deadline extended

The deadline for submitting papers to the 2014 North American Summer School for Logic, Language and Information has been extended to March 14. Here’s the new call:

CALL FOR PAPERS
NASSLLI 2014 STUDENT SESSION

June 23-27, 2014
University of Maryland, College Park

The North American Summer School for Logic, Language and Information (NASSLLI) welcomes paper submissions for presentation at its Student Session. Submissions may be in any of the fields related to the school (logic and language, logic and computation, or language and computation) and should represent original, unpublished work by individuals who will not yet have received their Ph.D. by the time of the conference.

The Student Session will co-occur with NASSLLI and provides students an excellent opportunity to present their work to experts in their field as well as to a broader, well-informed interdisciplinary audience. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three specialists who will provide commentary on the paper regardless of its acceptance status. Select accepted papers will also be considered for inclusion in a potential volume of the conference’s proceedings.

Submissions should be prepared for blind review (i.e., should not contain any information identifying the author) and should be uploaded as a .pdf file to the Student Session’s EasyChair site. Submissions should not exceed 10 pages and should be formatted standardly (11 or 12 point font, 1 inch margins).

No more than one-single authored and one co-authored paper should be submitted by an
individual. (All co-authors should also be students.) Authors whose submissions have been
accepted and who intend to present will be required to register for NASSLLI.


IMPORTANT DATES:
Submissions due: March 14, 2014 (by midnight)
Notifications: April 21, 2014

WEBSITES:
Submissions: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=stusnasslli14
NASSLLI 2014: http://www.nasslli2014.com/

Pasquereau at PRG tonight

Coral Williams and Ivy Hauser write:

PRG will be meeting tonight, February 24, at 7:00 pm in Brian Smith’s residence. According to Brian: "Parking is easiest on Fort Hill Terrace, but it's competitive". We will be hearing Jeremy Pasquereau give a practice talk for WCCFL, and there  will be more delicious Thai food!

As a reminder, the next meeting of PRG will be next Monday, March 3,  where we will hear from Emiliana at Ivy's place. Please let Ivy or me know about any questions, comments,  or concerns.

Clauss at LARC

Michael Clauss will be giving a talk entitled “Ambiguity between questions and relative clauses for children and adults” at LARC this Thursday at 9:45 in the Partee room.

Emiliana Cruz talks tomorrow

Emiliana Cruz in Anthropology is giving a talk tomorrow (Monday, February 24) entitled: "Training Indigenous People to Study their Languages”  at 3:30pm in Machmer W-24.

Nathaniel Smith speaks on Wednesday

Nathaniel Smith, a Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, will give a talk at 12:00 on Wednesday, Feb. 26, in Tobin 521B. The title of his talk is ''Building a Bayesian bridge between the physics and the phenomenology of social interaction.’’ An abstract follows.

What is word meaning, and where does it live? Both naive intuition andscientific theories in fields such as discourse analysis and socio-and cognitive linguistics place word meanings, at least in part,outside the head: in important ways, they are properties of speechcommunities rather than individual speakers. Yet, from aneuroscientific perspective, we know that actual speakers andlisteners have no access to such consensus meanings: the physicalprocesses which generate word tokens in usage can only depend directlyon the idiosyncratic goals, history, and mental state of a singleindividual. It is not clear how these perspectives can be reconciled.This gulf is thrown into sharp perspective by current Bayesian modelsof language processing: models of learning have taken the formerperspective, and models of pragmatic inference and implicature havetaken the latter. As a result, these two families of models, thoughbuilt using the same mathematical framework and often by the samepeople, turn out to contain formally incompatible assumptions.

Here, I'll present the first Bayesian model which can simultaneouslylearn word meanings and perform pragmatic inference. In addition tocapturing standard phenomena in both of these literatures, it givesinsight into how the literal meaning of words like "some" can beacquired from observations of pragmatically strengthened uses, andprovides a theory of how novel, task-appropriate linguisticconventions arise and persist within a single dialogue, such as occursin the well-known phenomenon of lexical alignment. Over longer timescales such effects should accumulate to produce language change;however, unlike traditional iterated learning models, our simulatedagents do not converge on a sample from their prior, but instead showan emergent bias towards belief in more useful lexicons. Our modelalso makes the interesting prediction that different classes ofimplicature should be differentially likely to conventionalize overtime.  Finally, I'll argue that the mathematical "trick" needed toconvince word learning and pragmatics to work together in the samemodel is in fact capturing a real truth about the psychologicalmechanisms needed to support human culture, and, more speculatively,suggest that it may point the way towards a general mechanism forreconciling qualitative, externalist theories of social interactionwith quantitative, internalist models of low-level perception andaction, while preserving the key claims of both approaches.

Naomi Feldman gives department colloq on Friday

Naomi Feldman (University of Maryland) gives the department colloquium this Friday, February 28, in Machmer E-37 at 3:30. Her talk is entitled “Interactive learning of sounds and words.” An abstract follows:

Infants begin learning words during the same period as they learn phonetic categories, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which sounds appear.  This work uses computational and behavioral methods to test the hypothesis that infants’ developing knowledge of words provides useful information for learning about phonetic categories.  A first set of simulations examines the potential benefit of a developing lexicon that contains no semantic information.  A Bayesian model is constructed that learns to categorize speech sounds and words simultaneously, and this model outperforms a model that is solely focused on learning phonetic categories.  Artificial language learning experiments demonstrate that human learners can use word-level information to constrain phonetic learning, and that they are sensitive to this information at the same age when they are learning phonetic categories.  A second set of simulations examines the potential role of weak semantic knowledge in constraining sound and word learning.  The model is given weak semantic information about the situations in which words appear, and this situational semantic information is shown to be particularly beneficial for phonetic learning when the developing lexicon contains many similar-sounding words.  Together, these results point to a critical role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition and highlight the importance of considering how children integrate statistical information across multiple layers of linguistic structure.

Pater at Berkeley on Monday

Joe Pater will give the colloquium talk at University of California at Berkeley on Monday entitled “Structural Bias in Phonology.” An abstract of the talk follows.

Chomsky and Halle (1968) propose an Evaluation Procedure that prefers featurally simple rules and grammars, and Bach and Harms (1972) propose that this bias for structural simplicity can explain instances of historical change in terms of rule simplication in learning. In this talk, I discuss an alternative model of structural bias (Pater and Moreton 2012) cast in a Maximum Entropy framework (Goldwater and Johnson 2003, Hayes and Wilson 2008), which does not invoke an explicit simplicity metric. In the first part of this talk, I present this model, and the results of a phonotactic learning experiment that supports its predictions (Moreton et al. 2013). 

I also present the results of an ERP study (Moore-Cantwell et al. 2013) that provides insight into the nature of the phonotactic knowledge acquired in an experimental setting. After participants are trained on a small set of pattern-conforming words, we find that novel words that violate the pattern elicit a larger Late Positive Component (LPC) than the novel conforming items. LPCs have been observed in response to syntactic violations in language, and also violations of musical expectation. Finding an LPC rather than an N400 effect for the novel words is consistent with the view that participants in these experiments are forming an abstract generalization about the phonotactic pattern rather than directly judging the similarity of novel and trained words. It is also noteworthy that the response to a laboratory learned phonotactic constraint is similar to that for a naturally learned one (Domahs 2009).

In the last part of the talk, I present a model of how structural bias can impact phonological typology, which uses MaxEnt learning in the context of agent-based modeling. I present simulation results (Pater and Staubs 2013) that show the emergence of featural economy (Clements 2003) in systems produced by agent interaction. In these results the tendency towards simplicity is balanced by a tendency to maintain contrast between potentially homophonous words. No constraints or principles specifically demanding economy or contrast are required to obtain these results, suggesting that it is possible to maintain the standard view that phonological grammars evaluate individual representations, rather than entire systems.

Andries Coetzee: LSA Member Spotlight

UMass alumnus Andries Coetzee has been put under the LSA’s spotlight.

Bhatt at Konstanz

Rajesh Bhatt presented with Veneeta Dayal on polar questions in Hindi-Urdu at the Workshop on Non-Canonical Quesitons and Interface Issues, on the 18th of February the Kloster Hegne, Germany. The handout is here. UMass alumna Maria Biezma also gave a talk on “qué questions."

UMass at GLOW

The program for the 37th annual meeting of the Generative Linguists of the Old World has been published and includes the following two papers from UMass students.

Ethan Poole, “A Configurational Account of Finnish Case."

Yangsook Park, “Indexicals and the long-distance reflexive ‘cali’ in Korean"

Congratulations Yangsook and Ethan!

Sokolowski gives Commonwealth College Alumni talk on Tuesday

UMass alumnus Peter Sokolowski will give a talk entitled “Dictionary as Data: What the Online Dictionary Tells us about English” on Tuesday, February 18, at 5:30 PM Events Hall-East, Commonwealth College. Mr. Sokolowski is Editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster.

Fava at Cognitive Colloquium on Wednesday

Alexandra Jesse writes:

This is just a reminder that Eswen Fava is giving a talk this week in our Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15). The title of the talk is "Examining how environment and experience influence speech processing during infancy".

The abstract is:
We will examine how speech and visual perception and processing are influenced by different types of experiences and environments. The bulk of the talk will discuss a series of neurophysiological studies that explore how infants process different types of complex auditory stimuli, including speech and music.  We will discuss what neural resources are used to process these stimuli and the role biological maturation and experience.  Finally, we will explore current data and future directions that employ longitudinal training paradigms that enable us to examine how specific types of experiences with speech influence visual perception and attention.

Kamiya speaks at LARC on Thursday

Magda Oiry writes:

Please join us for the presentation by Masaaki Kamiya (Hamilton College) at the LARC meeting on Thursday in the Partee room:

 

Investigations in the representation and acquisition of negative quantifiers in nominalizations

NB: new time, we will start promptly at 9:45.

 

Everyone welcome!

Rohena-Madrazo gives Hispanic Linguistics talk on Friday

We are pleased to announce the second of three talks in the Hispanic Linguistics Talk Series this year:

Marcos Rohena-Madrazo (Middlebury College)

Talk title: Diagnoses of a completed sound change: phonetic and phonological evidence for /ʃ/ in Buenos Aires Spanish

When: Friday, February 21st at 4pm

Where: 301 Herter Hall

See abstract below.

In this talk, I present a sociolinguistic analysis of the voicing variation of /ʃ/: [ʒ~ʃ] in Buenos Aires Spanish (BAS), which has been characterized as a sound change in progress from  /ʒ/ > [ʃ]. For example, in BAS the middle consonant in the words "allá" or "oyó" used to be generally pronounced with a voiced postalveolar fricative [ʒ], like the <s> in English "vision", but now many BAS speakers pronounce it with a voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ], like the <sh> in English "fishing". In order to determine for which speakers or social groups the devoicing change has reached completion, I implement a novel method that not only compares the percentage voicing levels of /ʒ/ to the inherent voicing variation of /s/, but also compares the phonologically conditioned affrication patterns of /ʒ/ to those of /s/. If the voicing levels of /ʒ/ are not significantly different from those of /s/ and the /ʒ/ no longer exhibits allophonic affrication tendencies, regardless of position, then one can conclude that the speaker's underlying postalveolar fricative is /ʃ/; they are a '’devoiced.'' The sociolinguistic results suggest that the younger, middle class speakers are ‘'devoicers"; however, other social groups also have "devoicers” and "non-robust voicers," which seems to indicate that the /ʒ/ devoicing change is still progressing and perhaps nearing conclusion.

Partee in Utrecht

Barbara Partee was in Utrecht Feb 13 -15 to participate in Lisa Bylinina’s Ph.D. dissertation defense on Feb 14 and to take part in a defense-day workshop that also included talks by Lisa, by her advisor Rick Nouwen, and by fellow committee member Louise McNally. Barbara’s talk was “On the history of the question, ‘Are meanings in the head?’ ”.

Psych EM on Tuesday

Brian Dillon writes:

Wondering and worrying where Psych EM was this semester? Never fret! Psych EM rides again in the Winter 2014 semester. We'll start up our semi-regular evening meetings this semester by meeting on Tuesday February 25th at 8pm in Packard's in Northampton (we'll be reserving a larger, private back room. That way we can have beer AND privacy).

John and I are going to lead discussion of a recent paper called 'Modeling accuracy as a function of response time with the generalized linear model' by Davidson & Martin. A copy of it can be obtained here.

Check it out if you can, and come join us at Packard's for a rousing discussion of the joint analysis of reaction time and accuracy data!

Tentative PRG Schedule

Coral Williams and Ivy Hauser write:

Here is the tentative meeting schedule for the rest of the semester.  Please note that we are NOT MEETING THIS COMING MONDAY, February 17.  Instead, we will meet the week after, on February 24. Stay tuned for  further information.

Meeting Schedule:
February 24 - Jeremy's WCCFL practice talk
March 3 - We will hear from Emiliana. Hosted at Ivy's house.
March 31 - Open House Aftermath, hosted at Claire's place
April 14 - Possibly reading? Hosted at Brian's
April 28 - Possibly reading? Hosted at Ivy's

Hosts and presenters: please let us know if you will be unable to host  or present on the day you are scheduled so we can make any necessary  arrangements. If anyone wants to volunteer to host a meeting, or has  anything they want to talk about at PRG, or has any comments or  concerns, we'd love to hear from you!

CUNY conference program available

The 27th annual CUNY conference on Human Sentence Processing, which will take place March 13-15 at Ohio State University, has recently published its schedule. UMass is well represented:

Brian Dillon, Josh Levy, Adrian Staub and Charles Clifton: Linear order effects in agreement: Evidence from English wh-questions

Jesse Harris and Katy Carlson: “The local contrast expectation in ‘let alone’ coordination"

Suzi Lima: “Language affects quantity judgments in bilingual Yudja speakers"

Amy Schafer, with Kitaek Kim and Theres Grüter: “Effects of morphological and prosodic focus cues on topic maintenance in Korean"

Michael Walsh Dickey, with Evelyn Milburn and Tessa Warren: “No lexical boost: verb-based information does not facilitate prediction over and above event-based knowledge in the visual world"

Jesse Harris: “Shifting viewpoints and discourse economy"

Florian Schwarz: “Soft and hard presupposition triggers are fast in online processing"

Jesse Harris and Katy Carlson: “Focus preferences for focus-sensitive particles (and why)"

Florian Schwarz, with Cory Bill, Jacopo Romoli and Stephen Crain: “Indirect scalar implicatures are neither scalar implicatures nor presuppositions (or both)"

Brian Dillon “Locality in filler-gap dependencies: Evidence from extraposition"

Glynis MacMillan and Iiia Kurenkov, with Wing Yee Chow, Shefali Shah, Ellen Lau and Colin Phillips: “Partial use of available information in early stages of verb prediction."

Brian Dillon, with Akira Omaki, Takuya Kubo, Manami Sato and Hiromu Sakai: “Anti-locality preference in the processing of Japanese reflexive binding."

Florian Schwarz, with Dan Grodner: “Pragmatic narrowing in reference resolution: Domain restriction and perspective taking"

Katy Carlson, with Michael Frazier: “Prosodic and syntactic effects in gapping interpretation"

Brendan O'Connor on text analysis today

Brendan O'Connor, CMU, will give a talk today, February 10, at
4 PM in Computer Science Building 150 entitled “Statistical Text Analysis for Social Science.” An abstract follows.

What can text analysis tell us about society? Corpora of news, books, and social media encode human beliefs and culture. But it is impossible for a researcher to read all of today's rapidly growing text archives. My research develops statistical text analysis methods that measure social phenomena from textual content, especially in news and social media data. For example: How do changes to public opinion appear in microblogs? What topics get censored in the Chinese Internet? What character archetypes recur in movie plots? How do geography and ethnicity affect the diffusion of new language? In order to answer these questions effectively, we must apply and develop scientific methods in statistics, computation, and linguistics.

In this talk I will illustrate these methods in a project that
analyzes events in international politics. Political scientists are
interested in studying international relations through *event data*:
time series records of who did what to whom, as described in news
articles. To address this event extraction problem, we develop an
unsupervised Bayesian model of semantic event classes, which learns the verbs and textual descriptions that correspond to types of
diplomatic and military interactions between countries. The model
uses dynamic logistic normal priors to drive the learning of semantic
classes; but unlike a topic model, it leverages deeper linguistic
analysis of syntactic argument structure. Using a corpus of several
million news articles over 15 years, we quantitatively evaluate how
well its event types match ones defined by experts in previous work,
and how well its inferences about countries correspond to real-world
conflict. The method also supports exploratory analysis; for example,
of the recent history of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Second Call: ESSLLI

Models in formal Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop held at ESSLLI 26, August 18-22, Tuebingen, Germany

Organizers: 
* Magdalena Kaufmann, University of Connecticut* Stefan Kaufmann, University of Connecticut

Invited Speakers:
* Michael Glanzberg, Northwestern University* Stanley Peters, Stanford University* Thomas Ede Zimmermann, Frankfurt University

Workshop Information:
Whatever happened to "model-theoretic" semantics?  Since Montague’s groundbreaking work and throughout much of its history, the field of formal semantics (and later pragmatics) was characterized by the use of models - abstract mathematical structures in which linguistic expressions are interpreted and which serve as the backdrop for stating generalizations about their semantic properties and relations.

Over the last couple of decades, however, the once-prominent status ofmodels has been eroding. In the research literature, explicitlydefined fragments and models were the norm in the early days (Partee1975, 1976; Dowty, 1979), but are now the exception rather than therule. In teaching, one of the most widely used textbooks, Heim andKratzer (1998), makes no mention of models, in stark contrast withearly standard works like Dowty, Wall and Peters (1981). Aside fromsuch signs of waning interest, there is a small but formidable body ofwork which actively questions the status of models and finds them tobe of limited use at best (Lepore 1983; Higginbotham 1988; Zimmermann 1999, 2011; Glanzberg, t.a.).
Such explicit reflections are rare, however. The overall decline ofmodels in the field is not driven by a general debate, let aloneconsensus. Nor is the turn away from models a turn towards somenon-model-theoretic alternative. What we do see instead is a tendencyto stay loosely within the model-theoretic framework, but to enrich itwith notions and tools whose formal properties remain largely implicit.

The goal of this workshop is to promote and generate discussion of thepast, present, and future of models in natural-language semantics andpragmatics, specifically the implications of their apparent demise forthe foundations and goals of the field. Topics for discussion include,but are in no way limited to the following:

* What are models, anyway?  Commitments about language, reality, and the nature of meaning that a model-theoretic approach to semantic analysis implies. The (special?) status of possible worlds and their relationship to extensional models.

* What are models good for? Linguistic phenomena or aspects of meaning in whose analysis a model-theoretic approach has been, or would be, crucial or at least beneficial. The (potential) use of models         in treating meaning as variable (e.g., in the analysis of uncertainty about language, or in cross-linguistic and diachronic comparative semantics).

* Where do models get in the way? Desiderata for semantic theory and limitations of the model-theoretic approach. Risks and side effects of specific methods associated with the model-theoretic approach (e.g., meaning postulates).

* Are we safe without models? Advantages and potential pitfalls of innovative uses of formal techniques or metalinguistic expressions, whose repercussions are underexplored (various kinds of states and events, partial functions, etc.)

* What are the alternatives? 

Workshop Format: 
The workshop is part of ESSLLI and open to all ESSLLI participants. It will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days in the second week of ESSLLI. The three invited talks are allotted one hour each, including discussion. On the first day, the workshop organizers will give a 30-minute introduction to thetopic. This leaves room for eight submitted papers of 30 minutes each,including discussion.

Submission Procedure:
Authors are invited to submit an abstract of up to three pages,including examples and/or references (single-spaced, at least 11 pt font, on US letter of A4 paper with margins at least 1in or 2.5cm on all sides, in .pdf, .txt, .doc or .odt format). Abstracts must be submitted by February 15, 2014, electronically at the following address: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/Models_ESSLLI14