Woodbury at Sound Workshop

John Kingston writes:

Tony Woodbury will present his joint work with Stephanie Villard on tone in Zacatepec Chatino in Sound Workshop on Friday 26 February 1-2 in ILC N451.

UMass at AAAS

Tom Roeper writes:

Last weekend Barbara Pearson and I (and Megan Armstrong was there too) participated in the Family Science section of AAAS in Washington where all kinds of booths on science, geo-science, lego-robots, astronauts were present--and a booth with about 30 language folks, from profs to grad students to undergrads, interacted with children (usually using ipads, as we did) on language issues from phonetics to recursion (our domain). It was supported by NSF and the Language outreach program of the University of Maryland. We had a great time---particularly with the many autistic children who came--illustrating, playing with, and explaining recursion in terms of possessives.PP's, compounds, and relative clauses. Next year it will be in Boston and it might be nice to have a larger UMass contingent.

Call for papers: Sinn und Bedeutung

Sinn und Bedeutung 21 will take place in Edinburgh, from Sun 4th-Tues 6th September 2016.

We invite abstract submissions for oral presentations or posters, devoted to natural language semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and psycholinguistic investigations related to meaning. Oral presentations will be scheduled for 40 minute slots (30 minutes talk + 10 minutes discussion).

Abstracts should contain original research that, at the time of submission, has neither been published nor accepted for publication. One person can submit at most one abstract as sole author and one abstract as co-author (or two co-authored abstracts).

Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font size no less than 12pt, and with margins of 1 inch/2.5cm. Please submit abstracts via EasyChair (see link below) no later than March 31, 2016. When you submit your abstract, you will be asked to indicate whether you would like it to be considered for a talk, a poster or both.

Abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair, using the following link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sub21

For further information, please contact Rob Truswell (rob.truswell@ed.ac.uk).

UQAM Cognitive Science Summer School

Host Institution: Université du Québec à MontréalCoordinating Institution: Université du Québec à Montréal

Website: http://www.summer16.isc.uqam.ca/page/renseignement.php?lang_id=2

Dates: 20-Jun-2016 - 01-Jul-2016

Location: Montréal, Québec, Canada

Focus: Reasoning is an important component of human cognitive ability, and, as such, it is investigated by an extremely broad range of disciplines and interdisciplinary endeavors, including many branches of linguistics. The University of Quebec at Montreal thus welcomes linguists and language scholars interested in reasoning to attend its two-week summer school that focuses on this theme.Minimum Education Level: BA

Description:Registration is now open for UQAM's Cognitive Science Summer School, taking place from June 20 to July 1 2016 on our campus in downtown Montreal, just steps from Jazz Fest and other cultural activites. This year's theme is 'Reasoning' and the two-week program covers topics related to a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines including language acquisition, pragmatics, modality, computational linguistics, and Bayesian psycholinguistics in addition to other areas of cognitive science. An ensemble of more than 50 internationally-renowned researchers will team teach these topics via lectures and discussions, held entirely in English. We welcome the participation of graduate students as well as post-graduate scholars, faculty and other professionals. Continuing education or course credit may be possible.

For further details, including the full program and list of instructors, see the summer school website. 

Linguistic Field(s):

Cognitive Science

Computational Linguistics

Language Acquisition

Linguistic Theories

Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics

Psycholinguistics

Semantics

Tuition: 150 CAD

Registration: 01-Feb-2016 to 17-Jun-2016

Contact Person: Elizabeth Allyn Smith

Email: eallynsmithaddress-marker.gifgmail.com

Seth Cable talks in Semantics Workshop

Seth will be presenting his paper “The Curious Implicatures of Optional Past Tense in Tlingit (and other languages,” in Semantics Workshop this week. Semantics Workshop meets on Wednesday in ILC N458 from 12:20-1:10.

 

 

Lingle on Tuesday

This term’s Lingle (the Linguistics Majors Mingle) will meet on Tuesday, February 16, at 5PM in ILC N400. The Lingle will be devoted to the ways in which majors can prepare for non-academic jobs.

Ethan Poole speaks in Syntax Workshop

In compliance with the UMass calendar, Syntax Workshop will meet this week on Tuesday, Feb. 16,  (instead of Monday) at 4PM in ILC N451. Ethan Poole will be giving his forthcoming GLOW talk “the locality of dependent Case."

PRG meets on Thursday

Brandon Prickett writes:

We're going to begin discussing journal articles in PRG at our next meeting (which will be on Thursday, 2/18). If you're interested in doing this with us and were not at the last meeting (on 2/4), then email me so I can include you in the email chain in which we discuss what will be presented (if you email me, I'll also explain what we're doing in more detail than I did here).

Masters in Computational Linguistics at Rochester University

The Computational Linguistics MS program at Rochester trains students to be conversant both in the analysis of language and in computational techniques applied to natural language. The curriculum consists of courses in Linguistics and Computer Science for a total of 32 credit hours.

Graduates from the Computational Linguistics MS program will be prepared for both further training at the PhD level in Computer Science and Linguistics and Computational Linguistics positions in industry. A growing number companies such as Google, Amazon.com, Nuance, LexisNexis, Oracle and many others are searching for employees with advanced degrees in Computational Linguistics for positions ranging from speech recognition technology to improving translation systems to developing bettermodels of language understanding. 

For fullest consideration, applicants should submit completed applications by March 1, though applications will continue to be considered as space permits. All documents and application materials should be uploaded in the online application (https://apply.grad.rochester.edu/apply/). Fees for applications received by February 15 waived (more information: https://apply.grad.rochester.edu/register/ASEwaiver). 

Direct questions to jeffrey.runner@rochester.edu

For more information about the program, go here.

Oiry at LARC on Wednesday

Magda Oiry will give the talk “How Children Deal with Contextually Canceled Presupposition” in LARC’s meeting this week: Wednesday, February 10, at 12:15 in ILC N451. This is the talk she will present at the meeting of DGfS at the end of this month. An abstract can be found here.

Sam Bowman talks at Computer Science

Sam Bowman of Stanford University will be giving the talk “Modeling Natural Language Semantics with Learned Representations” on Thursday, February 11, at 4PM in CS room 151. An abstract of his talk follows

The last few years have seen many striking successes from artificial neural network models on hard natural language processing tasks. These models replace complex hand-engineered systems for extracting and representing the meanings of sentences with learned functions that construct and use their own internal vector-based representations. Though these learned representations are effective in many domains, they aren't interpretable in familiar terms and their ability to capture the full range of meanings expressible in natural language is not yet well understood.

In this talk, I argue that neural network models are capable of learning to represent and reason with the meanings of sentences. First, I use entailment experiments over artificial languages to show that existing models can learn to reason logically over clean language-like data. I then introduce a large new corpus of entailments in English and use experiments on that corpus to show that these abilities extend to natural language as well. Finally, I briefly present ongoing work on a new model that uses the semantic principle of compositionality to more efficiently and effectively learn to understand natural language.

SRG this week

Leland Kusmer writes:

The results of the poll indicate that we're going to be reading Williams 2003 this semester! We'll start discussing the book this week — please try to read pp. 5-23 (up to section 1.5) for this meeting.
Our next meeting is this coming Thursday, the 11th; at that meeting, we'll hear from our visitor Polina and also discuss the part of the reading mentioned above. Location is TBA.

Howard Karloff speaks in Computer Science

Variable Selection is Hard

Who: Howard Karloff

When: Feb 9, 1-2pm

Where: Computer Science Building, room 150/151

Website: https://www.cics.umass.edu/event/theory-speaker-variable-selection-hard 

Abstract:

Consider the task of a machine-learning system faced with voluminous data on m individuals.  There may be p=10^6 features describing each individual.  How can the algorithm find a small set of features that “best” describes the individuals?  People usually seek small feature sets both because models with small feature sets are understandable and because simple models usually generalize better.

We study the simple case of linear regression, in which a user has an m x p matrix B and a vector y, and seeks a p-vector x *with as few nonzeroes as possible* such that Bx is approximately equal to y, and we call it SPARSE REGRESSION.  There are numerous algorithms in the statistical literature for SPARSE REGRESSION, such as Forward Selection, Backward Elimination, LASSO, and Ridge Regression.
We give a general hardness proof that (subject to a complexity assumption) no polynomial-time algorithm can give good performance (in the worst case) for SPARSE REGRESSION, even if it is allowed to include more variables than necessary, and even if it need only find an x such that Bx is relatively far from y.
This is joint work with Dean Foster and Justin Thaler  and was done when all coauthors were at Yahoo Labs.

Bio: After receiving a PhD from UC Berkeley, Howard Karloff taught at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech before leaving Georgia Tech  to join AT&T Labs–Research in 1999.  He left ATT Labs in 2013 to join Yahoo Labs in New York, where he stayed till February, 2015. Now he does data science for Goldman Sachs in New York.

A fellow of the ACM, he has served on the program committees of numerous conferences and chaired the 1998 SODA program committee. He is the author of numerous journal and conference articles and  the Birkhauser book “Linear Programming.”  His interests include  data science, machine learning, algorithms, and optimization.

AIX Summer School on Prosody

AIX SUMMER SCHOOL ON PROSODY 2016:

Methods in Prosody and Intonation Research: Data, Theories, Transcription

Laboratoire de Parole et Langage, Aix Marseille Université, France.

September 6-9, 2016

http://aixprosody2016.weebly.com/

We are pleased to announce the "Aix Summer School on Prosody 2016 " tobe held from September 6-9, 2016 in Aix en Provence (France).

The Aix Summer School on Prosody 2016 will bring together experts ontheoretical and practical aspects of the research on prosody. The school will be organized around morning lectures and afternoon tutorials (where participants will practice concepts and skills discussed in lectures) and data clinics (where participants can bring together their own data and questions for discussion).

The school is intended for post-graduate students and researchers interested in all the theoretical and practical aspects of the research on prosody and intonation. The school will be suitable bothfor researchers already working on intonation and prosody, and wishingto learn more about specific topics, and for researchers who wish tobetter understand how to incorporate and control prosody in their own work.

Topics will include (but not limited to): theoretical models on prosody and intonation; perception of intonation; prosody and language pathologies; prosody, semantics, and discourse; prosody and L2;prosody and neurolinguistics; transcription of intonation and prosody;statistical methods in prosody research; and preparation of stimulifor perception studies.

The confirmed invited speakers are:

Amalia Arvaniti (Kent University): Theoretical models of prosody

Mariapaola  D'Imperio (Aix-Marseille Université - IUF): Tonal alignment: perception and production

Laura Dilley (Michigan State University): Prosody and perception methods

Janet Fletcher (The University of Melbourne): Transcription of under-described languages

James Sneed German (Aix-Marseille Université): Prosody and discourse

Kiwako Ito (Ohio State University): Prosody and acquisition, prosody and eye tracking

Jelena Krivokapić (University of Michigan): Prosody and articulatory phonology

Oliver Niebuhr (University of Southern Denmark): Prosody and experimental methods in acoustics

Bert Remeijsen and Otto Gwado Ayoker (University of Edimburgh):Typology and field methods in prosody research: Shilluk prosody workshop

Annie Tremblay (Kansas University): Prosody and L2

Application deadline: May 31st 2016

For more information, please visit http://aixprosody2016.weebly.com/

A number of scholarships will be offered for PhD students andpostdocs. For more information about registration and scholarships, go to http://aixprosody2016.weebly.com/registration.html

Call for papers ESSLLI

*2nd Call for Papers*

*ESSLLI 2016 STUDENT SESSION*

Held during the 28th European Summer School in Logic, Language andInformation

Bolzano, Italy, August 15-26, 2016

*Deadline for submissions: March 10th, 2016

*https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=essllistus2016

*ABOUT:*

The Student Session of the 28th European Summer School in Logic,Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Bolzano, Italy, August 15th to 26th (http://esslli2016.unibz.it). We invite submissions of original, unpublished work from students in any area at theintersection of Logic & Language, Language & Computation, or Logic &Computation. Submissions will be reviewed by several experts in thefield, and accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters andselected papers will appear in the Student Session proceedings bySpringer. This is an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedbackfrom expert readers and to present your work to a diverse audience.

*ORAL/POSTER PRESENTATIONS:*

Note that there are two separate kinds of submissions, one for oral presentations and one for posters. This means that papers are directly submitted either as oral presentations or as poster presentations. Reviewing and ranking will be done separately. We particularly encourage submissions for posters, as they offer an excellent opportunity to present smaller research projects and research in progress.

*SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:*

Authors must be students, and submissions may be singly or jointly authored. Each author may submit at most one single and one jointly authored contribution. Submissions should not be longer than 8 pages foran oral presentation or 4 pages for a poster presentation (including examples and references). Submissions must be anonymous, without any identifying information. More detailed guidelines regarding submissioncan be found on the Student Session website: http://www2.sfs.unituebingen.de/esslli-stus-2016/.

*SPONSORSHIP AND PRIZES*

As in previous years, Springer has kindly agreed to sponsor the ESSLLI student session. The best poster and best talk will be awarded Springerbook vouchers of 500€ each.

*FURTHER INFORMATION:*

Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to marisa.koellner@uni-tuebingen.de andrziai@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de.

ESSLLI 2016 will feature a wide range of foundational and advanced courses and workshops in all areas of Logic, Language, and Computation. For further information, including registration information and courselistings, and for general inquiries about ESSLLI 2016, please consult the main ESSLLI 2016 page: http://esslli2016.unibz.it.

PhD positions and Postdocs in Amsterdam

There are a number of vacancies for PhD students and Postdocs in the inquisitive semantics group in Amsterdam. The projects are briefly described below. The deadline for applications is 15 March 2016, and the projects will start in the fall.

If you are interested in one of these positions, please get in touch with:

- Floris Roelofsen (floris.roelofsen@gmail.com)

- Ivano Ciardelli (i.a.ciardelli@uva.nl)

Project 1 (PhD, 4 years): First-order inquisitive logic

This project is intended for a PhD student with a background in logic.Intended starting date: 1 September 2016.Apply through the UvA website.

One important novelty of the inquisitive approach is that it brings out the fact that questions have an important role to play in logic. For instance, suppose we know that Alice and Bob live in the same city. Then, information about Alice’s city of residence yields information about Bob’s city of residence. In inquisitive logic, this takes the form of an entailment:

Alice and Bob live in the same city,   where Alice lives   |=   where Bob lives

Thus, in inquisitive logic we can reason not only, as usual, with particular pieces of information (e.g., that Alice and Bob live in the same city), but also with information types (e.g., Alice’s city of residence), which may be instantiated by multiple pieces of information (that Alice lives in Amsterdam, that Alice lives in Paris, etc). Thus, bringing questions into play leads to an exciting generalization of the fundamental notions of classical logic.

The aim of the project is to explore the consequences of this new perspective, carrying out a thorough investigation of first-order inquisitive logic. What makes this especially urgent is that an extremely broad range of questions are expressible by means of a first-order logical language.
Understanding how to reason with these questions is not only important from a mathematical and philosophical point of view, but also stands to have impact in applications, since question entailment generalizes the notion of functional dependency which is central to database theory and dependence logic. Thus, an axiomatization result would provide effective methods to reason about first-order dependencies.

Project 2 (PhD, 4 years): An inquisitive perspective on quantification in natural language

This project is intended for a PhD student with a background in formal semantics.

Intended starting date: 1 September 2016.Apply through the UvA website.

On the standard view, quantifiers like every man and many students are treated as operators that map properties to truth-values. While this approach allows for an insightful characterization of quantifiers’ truth-conditional contribution, it also has some important limitations. First, interrogative quantifiers like which men and how many students are squarely beyond its scope. Second, even quantifiers like every man are problematic when they occur in questions. For instance, to interpret the question What did every man eat? as ‘for every man x, what did x eat?’, the quantifier needs to scope out of the question; but this is impossible, if its argument is required to be a property.

Inquisitive semantics suggests a simple shift in perspective that simultaneously addresses both these issues. It becomes possible to pursue an account of quantifiers that captures (i) their potential to generate inquisitive content, which is necessary to deal with interrogative quantifiers like which men, and (ii) their ability to propagate inquisitive content, which is necessary to deal with quantifiers scoping out of questions.

We also expect inquisitive semantics to enable us to decompose quantifiers into semantically more primitive parts. A key observation in this regard is that, across languages, quantifiers are often built up from question words. We aim to explain this connection and to show how the meaning of quantifiers can be derived in a systematic way from the inquisitive elements they contain.

Project 3 (Postdoc, ~2.5 years): Applications in computer science and experimental ratification

This project is intended for one or two Postdocs with a background in logic and/or formal semantics/pragmatics, preferably with a particular interest in one or both of the following: (i) computational applications of logic in computer science, in particular in database systems, (ii) experimental semantics/pragmatics.

Intended starting date: 1 September 2016.

Apply through the UvA website.

Inquisitive semantics has so far been used to shed new light on theoretical issues in semantics, pragmatics, logic, and philosophy of language. The aim of this project is to broaden this scope in two directions. First, we will explore practical applications of inquisitive logic in computer science, in particular in database systems. Suppose we have a database and we get a new query. Then instead of looking at the database itself, we may look at the already stored queries, and see whether they entail the new query (in the inquisitive sense). If so, it may be possible to resolve the new query without having to re-consult the database itself, with a substantial gain in efficiency. This is a widely used technique in database systems, but inquisitive logic may make it possible to deal with a much wider range of queries than current systems do.

Second, we want to carry out a number of experiments to corroborate the empirical predictions that are made by linguistic theories formulated in inquisitive semantics, and to further develop these theories guided by the obtained empirical results. Relevant phenomena include (but are not restricted to) the interpretation of disjunction, questions, question-embedding verbs, and other operators that arguably generate and/or propagate inquisitive content, such as quantifiers, modals, and conditionals.

Project 4 (Postdoc, ~2.5 years): A fully compositional dynamic inquisitive semantics

This project is intended for a Postdoc with a background in formal semantics, preferably with a particular interest in compositionality and dynamic semantics.

Intended starting date: 1 October 2016.

Apply through the UvA website.

Most work on inquisitive semantics so far has focused on InqB, the inquisitive counterpart of classical first-order logic. In order to obtain a full-fledged inquisitive framework for natural language semantics, this basic system needs to be extended in two ways. First, we need to allow for meaning composition at the sub-sentential level. Second, we need to capture dynamic aspects of meaning, e.g., cross- and inter-sentential anaphoric dependencies and presuppositions. The goal of this project is to develop a fully compositional dynamic inquisitive semantics, and to apply this framework to a number of linguistic phenomena involving inquisitiveness below and beyond the sentence boundary.

For Sophomores and Juniors: Linguistics Field School

The Linguistics Department of Swarthmore College and Haverford College will host a 5-week Linguistics Field School consisting of two weeks at Haverford College and three weeks of community-based work in Mexico (with Prof. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen) or in the Navajo Nation (with Prof. Ted Fernald).

Host Institutions:  Swarthmore College and Haverford College. In Oaxaca: Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova and Centro de Estudios Tecnológicos, industrial y de servicios (CETis) #124.  In the Navajo Nation: Navajo Technical University (NTU)

Dates: May 23 through June 25, 2016

Locations: Haverford, PA; Oaxaca, Mexico; Crownpoint, New Mexico

Description: The program will recruit a cohort of 12 undergraduates who have shown a strong interest in and commitment to linguistics, digital tools, and/or related fields. Students will being the program at Haverford College, where they will receive ten days of intensive training in linguistic field methods, digital recording, data analysis, field ethics, and allied disciplines. Students will then join local community language revitalization projects in Oaxaca, Mexico and the Navajo Nation for three weeks (6 students at each site), where they will work closely with language activists and scholars on a variety of projects. For the Navajo project, students will work on programming and testing a web-based application for generating Navajo verbs. The last 5 days will take place at Haverford College where students will receive follow-up training and process their field data.  

Interested students may find the NSF REU Linguistics Field School Facebook group useful in getting a sense of the experience. The Twitter hashtag is #LingFieldSchool.

Funding: All travel and living expenses will be covered, and students will also receive a generous weekly stipend.

Qualifications: Applicants should be currently enrolled undergraduates who have completed at least one year of college level studies. Students who will complete their B.A. by June 2016 are not eligible.  We especially welcome applications from students of community colleges, tribal-affiliated colleges in the US, and institutions where no linguistics major is available. Fluent or heritage speakers of Zapotec or Navajo are especially encouraged to apply.  This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program (grant #1461056), which limits applicants to US citizens or permanent residents.  Students should have experience (such as course work) in at least two of the following areas and demonstrated interest in others: linguistics, languages indigenous to the Americas (including Zapotec and Navajo), programming, web design, and digital humanities. For Oaxaca: applicants must have a valid passport at the time of application; competency in Spanish is necessary and programming experience with Android apps or iPhone apps is an asset.  For the Navajo Nation: an introductory computer science course or data structures course is desirable, or programming experience with Python or a web framework like Django.

Application Instructions: The application is available here.  Applications will require one letter of recommendation which must be emailed directly from the recommender to linguistics@swarthmore.edu by the application deadline.  The selection process is highly competitive and detailed letters that address the student’s potential for success in this type of program will be most helpful in determining the final cohort.

Application deadline: February 15, 2016.  

Syntax Workshop meets tomorrow

Thuy and Rodica will give a report on ConSOLE in Syntax Workshop tomorrow, February 1. Syntax Workshop meets on Mondays from 4:30-5:30 in ILC N458.

Tom and Rebecca at LARC

LARC will meet this Wednesday (Feb. 3) at 12:15 in ILC N451. Tom Roeper and Rebecca Woods will be give their forthcoming DGfS talk (Separating Tense and Assertion: Evidence from Embedded V2 and Child Language). All are welcome!

UMass at BLS

The 42nd meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society meets February 5-7 at UC, Berkeley. Joe Pater is one of the invited speakers — he is giving the talk “Learning in Typological Prediction: Grammatical Agent-Based modeling.” UMass is also represented by:

Alumnus Michael Becker, who is giving (with Honaida Ahyad) the talk “The predictability of vowel alternations in Urban Hijazi Arabic imperfective nonce forms” and (with Paola Cepeda) the talk “Sonority restricts laryngealized plosives in Southern Aymara"

Kristine Yu and Deniz Ozyildiz who are giving the talk “Emergence of tonal absolutive Case marking in Samoan.” (The abstract is at the end of this post.)

For more information, go here.

Emergence of tonal absolutive Case marking in Samoan

In Samoan, it appears that absolutive arguments are marked by a tonal case morpheme: A high tone (H-), aligned with the final mora of the phonological material preceding the argument. We propose that H- emerges from the segmental elision of the absolutive preposition `ia,' and the reassociation of ia's pitch accent with the left adjacent tone bearing unit. Indeed, absolutive H- and ia have similar distributions. Moreover, ia is sometimes so reduced that only a pitch accent remains of its exponence. Ergative and oblique case marking is not tonal. These segmental morphemes are monomoraic and unstressed, hence unable to provide a source tone, even when reduced.