At the next CLC meeting, Abe Handler will present on CCG and other mildly context sensitive grammars. The meeting will be April 19th, in CS303 from 1:30-2:30pm. All welcome! 

In the past, researchers have proposed a number of so-called mildly context-sensitive grammars, which were later shown to be weakly equivalent (i.e. can produce the same strings). Abe will introduce some of these grammars, place their motivations in context and discuss some of the reasons why researchers believe them to be equally expressive. (If you’re curious, see the long reference from Joshi, Shanker and Weir). He will also talk about one of the formalisms, CCG, in detail. So definitely read this! Note also that unlike some less familiar grammars, CCG has made its way into NLP.

From Gaja Jarosz:

The next meeting of CLC will take place at Psycholinguistics Workshop this Friday, March 24 (10am, ILC N400), and the theme for our discussion will be “Computational Arguments for Abstract Linguistic Structure”.

The next meeting of the Computational Linguistics Community will feature a presentation by Amanda Doucette on neural net modeling of phonological learning. The talk will take place at the Experimental Lab meeting, Feb 24th, 9:15am in ILC N400.

The next Computational Linguistics Community (CLC) meeting will take place at the NLP reading group on Wednesday, February 15, 1-2pm, in CS 303. We will be discussing a recent paper by Emily Bender on the role of linguistic typology in NLP:

Bender, Emily M. 2016. Linguistic Typology in Natural Language Processing. Linguistic Typology 20(3):645-660.

The following link should take you to the UMass library’s full text of this paper:

UMass Library Full Text

In the first meeting of the CLC, Brandon Prickett will present his ongoing work on Complexity, Natural Class Size, and Phonological Learning. The talk will take place in Grant Group, Monday, Feb. 6, 11am, in ILC N451. We hope to see you there!

We’re excited to announce the tentative schedule for the Computational Linguistics Community (CLC; pronounced ‘click’) meetings for this semester. Please note that the meetings will rotate around existing lab and reading group slots so note the day and time changes. Updates about this schedule and the events will be announced in this blog / newsletter. Please contact Gaja Jarosz for further information.

M Feb 6 (11am; Grant Group ILC N451) – Brandon Prickett
W Feb 15 (1pm; NLP Group CS 303) – Discussion of Bender paper on Typology
F Feb 24 (9:15am; Experimental Lab ILC N400) – Amanda Doucette
M Feb 27 (11am; Grant Group ILC N451) – Discussion/Reading preparation for Morgan
F March 3 (10am; Psycholinguistics ILC N400) – Emily Morgan
F March 24 (10am; Psycholinguistics ILC N400) – Psycholing/CL relationship
M April 3 (11am; Grant Group ILC N451) – Gaja Jarosz & Joe Pater
W April 12 (1pm; NLP Group CS 303) – TBA
F April 28 (11:15am; Sound Workshop ILC N400) – Su Lin Blodgett