Monthly Archives: December 2017

“Moving Linguists” in the Hot Chocolate Run

Members of the UMass Linguistics community continued our tradition of participating in the Hot Chocolate Run in Northampton on Sunday December 3rd. The event is a benefit for Safe Passage, an organization “dedicated to creating a world free of domestic violence and relationship abuse” (it’s not too late to donate – find “give” under the “fundraise” menu at the link above). The Moving Linguists included Sakshi Bhatia, Hazel Cable, Seth Cable, Summer Cable, Ivy Hauser, Jyoti Iyer, Gaja Jarosz, Magda Oiry, Marie Oiry-Pater, Zeke Oiry-Pater, Joe Pater, Matt Snover, and Hannah Young. Thanks to Magda, Sakshi, Summer and Seth for photos.

Pater’s “Substance Matters: a reply to Jardine 2016” to appear in Phonology

Joe Pater’s paper “Substance Matters: a reply to Jardine 2016” will appear in Phonology in early 2018. The final manuscript version is here: https://works.bepress.com/joe_pater/34/. Public comments on an earlier version can be found here: https://websites.umass.edu/phonolist/2016/04/15/pater-2016-substance-matters-a-reply-to-jardine-2016/.

Upcoming Computational Linguistics Community Events

Please join us for two upcoming CLC events!

  • Students in Cognitive Modeling (Ling 692c) present their final projects
    • Dec 8, 9-10am in ILC N400 (Psycholinguistics Workshop)
    • Students will give 5 minute presentations about their final class projects involving computational modeling of some psycholinguistic task or phenomenon
  • Students in Intro NLP (CS 585) give poster presentations of their final projects
    • Dec 12, 3:30-5pm (session 1) and 5-6:30 (session 2), in CS room 150/151
    • See description below from Brendan O’Connor

CS 585 Poster Sessions

Come check out 80+ poster presentations for natural language processing class projects this semester!  A sampling of topics include:
 – Movie revenue prediction using plot summary analysis
 – Irony detection in English tweets
 – Determining toxicity in social discussions
 – Cross-lingual transfer learning for Hindi part-of-speech tagging
There will be two sessions, both in CS room 150/151:
  – Session 1: 3:30-5:00
  – Session 2: 5:00-6:30
There will be different posters at each session, so come early and often!

Valentine Hacquard colloquium Friday Dec. 8th at 3:30

Valentine Hacquard of the University of Maryland will be presenting “Learning what ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean”, Friday December 8th at 3:30 in ILC N400. All are welcome – a reception will follow.

Abstract. The way languages across the world express modality shows both variation and convergence. In some languages, like English, the same modal words (e.g., must) can express different flavors of modality: “Jo must eat fish”, for instance, can express a likelihood that Jo is a fish eater (‘epistemic’ necessity) or an obligation Jo has to eat fish (‘deontic’ necessity). In other languages, modals are strictly monosemous. How do children figure out the modals of their language? What expectations, if any, do they bring to this learning problem? This talk focuses on English-learning children, and asks how they figure out that their modals can be used to express different flavors, what in their linguistic experience might give away modal polysemy, and what linguistic biases might guide this acquisition process.