Monthly Archives: September 2018

Open Mind: a new open access journal in Cognitive Science

From https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/opmi:

Open Mind provides a new venue for the highest quality, most innovative work in cognitive science, offering affordable open access publishing, concise and accessible articles, and quick turnaround times for authors. The journal covers the broad array of content areas within cognitive science, using approaches from cognitive psychology, computer science and mathematical psychology, cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, comparative psychology and behavioral anthropology, decision sciences, and theoretical and experimental linguistics. These approaches are applicable to a broad range of content areas, including learning and memory, attention and object recognition, language processing and development, causal reasoning, judgment and decision making, philosophy of mind, and more.

Open Mind is an Open Access journal. This gold OA publication charges an APC (Article Processing Charge) of $950 per accepted manuscript. See Submission Guidelines for additional details.

Alrenga in Linguistics colloquium Fri. 9/28 at 3:30

Peter Alrenga (UMass) will present a Linguistics colloquium at 3:30 in ILC N400. A reception will follow. All are welcome!

Title: Implicature Suspension and Ignorance:  When Redundancy Isn’t Enough

Abstract. According to the classical neo-Gricean view,  scalar upper-bounding inferences such as (1) are conversational implicatures driven by the maxim of Quantity.

(1)    a.  Paws ate some of his dinner.
         Inference:  Paws did not eat all of his dinner.
    b.  This semester, I will enroll in Semantics or Phonology.
         Inference: I will not enroll in both Semantics and Phonology.
The ensuing theory of scalar implicatures, elaborated in pioneering work by Horn and Gazdar, was for many years viewed as a success story par excellence of neo-Gricean pragmatics.  According to a more recent view, the so-called grammatical view, these inferences do not arise via pragmatic reasoning, but are instead calculated as a part of these sentences’ truth-conditional meanings, via the presence of a local strengthening operator.  One of the most compelling arguments for the grammatical view comes from the contrast between (1a) and (2).  Informally, the underlined disjunct in (2) serves to call off, or “suspend”, the scalar not all-inference that usually accompanies (1a).  Instead, (2) serves to convey the speaker’s ignorance regarding exactly how much Grover ate (perhaps just some, but perhaps more than that).

(2)    Paws ate some or (even) all of his dinner.

Beneath this contrast lurks an intriguing question:  how is it that truth-conditionally equivalent sentences, such as (1a) and (2), may nonetheless give rise to differing scalar inferences?  In the first part of the talk, I will review the answer to this question that has emerged from the grammatical view.  I will then show that this same question arises across a variety of “suspension” devices, such as those in (3).

(3)    a.  Grover ate at least some of his dinner.
    b.  This semester, I will enroll in Semantics or Phonology, if not both.
    c.  This semester, I will enroll in Semantics and/or Phonology.

A welcome feature of the grammatical view is that its account of the speaker ignorance conveyed by (2) readily generalizes to the sentences in (3), as I will also show.

An even more recent line of work seeks to derive the difference between (1a) and (2) from considerations of structural complexity.  The idea is (roughly) this:  given that (1a) and (2) are truth-conditionally equivalent, the second disjunct in (2) appears to be semantically redundant, since the speaker could have conveyed the same information using the first disjunct alone.  The ignorance conveyed by (2), as well as the local strengthening that facilitates this, can then be made to follow if this sort of redundancy is in fact penalized.  In the second part of the talk, I will argue that this proposal, appealing though it is, does not readily generalize to the sentences in (3).  Finally, I will offer some (programmatic) suggestions for what might instead account for the difference between (1) and (2)/(3).

Rogers in machine learning and friends Thurs. 27th at 11:45

who: Anna Rogers (UMass Lowell)
when: September 27th, 11:45 A.M. – 1:00 P.M.
where: Computer Science Building, Room 150/151
food: Athena’s Pizza

What’s In Your Embedding And How It Predicts Task Performance

Abstract: Word embeddings are the most widely used kind of distributional meaning representations in both industrial and academic NLP systems, and they can make dramatic difference in the performance of the system. However, the absence of a reliable intrinsic evaluation metric makes it hard to choose between dozens of models and their parameters. This work presents Linguistic Diagnostics (LD), a new methodology for evaluation, error analysis and development of word embedding models that is implemented in an open-source Python library. In a large-scale experiment with 14 datasets LD successfully highlights the differences in the output of GloVe and word2vec algorithms that correlate with their performance on different NLP tasks.

Bio: Anna is a post-doctoral associate in the Computer Science Department at Text Machine lab, University of Massachusetts (Lowell). She works at the intersection of linguistics, natural language processing, and machine learning. She holds a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Language and Information Sciences at the University of Tokyo (Japan). Her current research focuses on interpretability of deep learning, evaluation of distributional meaning representations, and semantic compositionality. She also leads annotation projects for sentiment analysis and temporal reasoning.

Myers in cognitive brown bag Weds. at noon

This week’s cognitive brown bag (Wednesday 12/26, 12:00-1:25, Tobin 521B) will be delivered by Ethan Myers of Hampshire College.  Title and abstract are below.

https://www.hampshire.edu/faculty/ethan-meyers

Title:    Decoding the neural algorithms that underlie behavior

In order to understand how the brain enables complex behaviors, a step-by-step account of how information is transformed from sensory input to motor output is needed. To gain insight into such neural algorithms, I have developed ‘population decoding’ data analysis methods that can be used to accurately track what information is in a brain region and how information is coded in neural activity. In this talk I will describe how, in collaboration with experimental neuroscientists, I have applied this method to spiking activity in macaque monkeys to examine:  1) how information is transformed from sensory signals into more abstract representations that are useful for behavior 2) how such representations are modified by task demands (i.e., attention), 3) how high level brain regions that receive this input (i.e., the prefrontal cortex) only selectively represents task relevant information, and 4) how the flow of information flow can be precisely tracked in a simple pop-out attention task. I will also briefly describe a set of tools that can be used to analyze a range of neural signals in order to gain further insight into the algorithms that brain uses to solve tasks.

Position in Cognitive Science of Language at University of Toronto

The Department of Linguistics and University College in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto invite applications for a full-time tenure stream position in the area of the Cognitive Science of Language. The appointment will be at the rank of Assistant Professor, and will commence on July 1, 2019, or shortly thereafter.  This will be a joint appointment between the Department of Linguistics (51%) and University College (49%).
Applicants must have earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics or a related area by the date of appointment or shortly thereafter, with a demonstrated record of excellence in teaching and research in the field of cognitive science of language. We seek candidates with a commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and expertise in experimental approaches in semantics/syntax and language acquisition and processing, and whose research and teaching interests complement and strengthen our existing departmental strengths.
The successful candidate will be expected to pursue innovative and independent research at the highest international level and to establish an outstanding, competitive and externally funded research program in support of the research and teaching missions of the Department of Linguistics and University College.
Candidates must provide evidence of research excellence as demonstrated by a record of publications in top-ranked and field relevant journals or forthcoming publications meeting high international standards, the submitted research statement, presentations at significant conferences, accolades or awards, and strong endorsements by referees of high standing.
Evidence of excellence in teaching will be provided through teaching accomplishments, the teaching dossier, a teaching statement, sample course syllabi, and the teaching evaluations submitted as part of the applications, as well as strong letters of reference.
Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.
The Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto has both a departmental and a collegiate structure.
The Department of Linguistics is an international leader in linguistics with strengths in theoretical, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics approaches. For more information about the Department, see: linguistics.utoronto.ca.
University College is the founding college of the University and has a long-standing commitment to challenging its diverse body of over 4500 undergraduate students to excel intellectually and to preparing them to engage in the wider world. The College’s Cognitive Science Program gives students the opportunity to explore the mind and its structures in an interdisciplinary context. For more information about the College, see: https://www.uc.utoronto.ca/.

 

Applicants must submit a cover letter of no more than 2 single-spaced pages, a current curriculum vitae, a research statement outlining current and future research interests, one recent article-length writing sample relevant to the position, and a teaching dossier including a statement of teaching philosophy,  course syllabi and teaching evaluations, and the names and email addresses of three referees.
Applicants must also arrange to have three signed letters of reference on letterhead, preferably as PDF documents, sent directly to Prof. Sali A. Tagliamonte via email to linguistics@utoronto.ca with the subject line: “Cognitive Science – (your full name)” by the job closing date.
All application materials, including reference letters, must be submitted online by November 21st, 2018.
Submission guidelines can be found at http://uoft.me/how-to-apply. We recommend combining attached documents into one or two files in PDF/MS Word format as follows: (1) Cover letter, CV, one recent article-length writing sample, and research statement; (2) Teaching dossier.
If you have questions about this position, please contact linguistics@utoronto.ca.
The University of Toronto is strongly committed to diversity within its community and especially welcomes applications from racialized persons / persons of colour, women, Indigenous / Aboriginal People of North America, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ persons, and others who may contribute to the further diversification of ideas.
As part of your application, you will be asked to complete a brief Diversity Survey. This survey is voluntary. Any information directly related to you is confidential and cannot be accessed by search committees or human resources staff. Results will be aggregated for institutional planning purposes. For more information, please see http://uoft.me/UP.
All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.

“Cognitive beer” Thurs. Sept. 27th at 4pm at the Moan and Dove

Please join us for the “cognitive beer” at the Moan and Dove next Thursday Sept. 27th at 4 pm. For our first meeting, we’ll just take the time to talk informally about what’s happening in CogSci at UMass, and what we might make happen in the future. One possibility for future meetings would be a journal club, which we successfully piloted a couple years ago, though not with beer (or peanuts). The meeting can last as long as people want, though some will need to leave by 5.

Sanders in Neurosciences Faculty Forum Friday Sept. 21 at noon

The next UMass Neurosciences Faculty Forum will be:
Friday, Sept 21st at noon in Tobin 521B

Lisa Sanders
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Title: A Potential Measure of Phonological Processing During Natural Speech Comprehension

We think we’ve discovered a new event-related potential (ERP) effect that could be important for measuring typical and atypical processing of speech sounds. What would it take to convince you (and funders) that it is a real thing and that it matters?

 

As always, there will be pizza.