Monthly Archives: April 2020

Carolyn Anderson, Tessa Patapoutian, and Max Nelson at BAICS

The Bridging AI and Cognitive Science workshop at ICLR 2020 is being held virtually on April 26th. UMass’s Carolyn Anderson and Tessa Patapoutian will be presenting a paper titled “Can Neural Network Models Learn Spatial Perspective from Text Alone?” and Max Nelson will be presenting a paper titled “Learning Hierarchical Syntactic Transformations with Encoder-Decoder Networks.” Full papers, and details on virtually attending, can be found at: https://baicsworkshop.github.io/

Faruk Akku? to UMass

We are delighted to welcome Faruk Akku? to UMass Linguistics. He will be starting as Assistant Professor in Fall of 2021. He is currently finishing up his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He describes his research interests as follows (https://web.sas.upenn.edu/akkusf/):

“My work is at the intersection of theoretical syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics, with a focus on endangered and un(der)studied languages. I study cross-dialectal variation in sentence structure, building primarily on data collected through fieldwork on un(der)documented languages. I specialize in Arabic dialects—particularly the so-called peripheral varieties, Turkish, Mutki Zazaki and Cherokee.”

Linzen colloquium Friday April 17 at 3:30

Tal Linzen, Johns Hopkins University, will present “What inductive biases enable human-like syntactic generalization?” in the Linguistics zolloquium series at 3:30 Friday April 17. An abstract follows. All are welcome! The Zoom link has already beensent out on department mailing lists. If you did not receive it and would like attend, please email Brian Dillon for the link.

Abstract
Humans apply their knowledge of syntax in a systematic way to constructions that are rare or absent in their linguistic input. This observation, traditionally discussed under the banner of the poverty of the stimulus, has motivated the assumption that humans are innately endowed with inductive biases that make crucial reference to syntactic structure. The recent applied success of deep learning systems that are not designed on the basis of such biases may appear to call this assumption into question; in practice, however, such engineering success speaks to this question in an indirect way at best, as engineering benchmarks do not test whether the system in fact generalizes as humans do. In this talk, I will use established psycholinguistic paradigms to examine the syntactic generalization capabilities of contemporary neural network architectures. Focusing on the classic cases of English subject-verb agreement and auxiliary fronting in English question formation, I will demonstrate how neural networks with and without explicit syntactic structure can be used to test for the necessity and sufficiency of structural inductive biases, and will present experiments indicating that human-like generalization requires stronger inductive biases than those expressed in standard neural network architectures.

LSA Summer Institute: call for course proposals

The 2021 Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute will be hosted at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The Institute will run from June 14 to July 9 in the Summer of 2021, and will provide 4 week and 2 week courses in a wide gamut of topics in linguistics. Each 90 minute class will meet twice a week. We anticipate that classes will have between 10 and 30 students in them.

The courses are arranged into three levels: introductory courses (100-level), intermediate (200-level), and advanced (300-level). The introductory courses are aimed at students who have had no, or negligible, exposure to the subject being taught, and the intermediate level courses are intended for students who have had one course in the area. These courses are all 4 weeks long. Advanced courses are in specialized topics and can be taken by students at any level, but the presumption will be that students have enough background in the relevant areas to follow high level material. The Institute’s theme is : Linguistics as cognitive science: universality and variation. The 300 level courses are chosen with that theme in mind.

If you would like to teach a course at the Summer Institute, please email a course proposal to us at lsa-call@umass.edu by May 1, 2020. We won’t have room for all of the courses pitched to us. We will let you know if we can accommodate your course by June 1, 2020. For the instructors of the accepted courses, the Institute will cover the costs of travel, University housing and will provide a small honorarium. Proposals to co-teach are welcome and we expect to be able to cover travel costs for all course instructors (the honorarium will be divided among the instructors).

In your course proposal provide us with the following information:

  1. The target audience.
  2. A Short course description (500 word limit).
  3. A Brief outline of motivation for the course (200 word limit).
  4. An Outline of course topics (or readings), i.e., a sense of its syllabus.
  5. Whether it is a 2 week or 4 week course.
  6. If applicable, the relevance of the course to the Institute’s theme
  7. The course title and instructor(s).

Try to not overlap with courses that have already been planned. You will find these described in the “planned curriculum” page which can be accessed through the menu above.

CUNY 2020 an incredible success

From Sarah Gibbons, of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts:

Set to take place on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus from March 19 through 21, the 33rd Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference seemed doomed in the face of mounting concerns and decisions to cancel events and transition to remote working and learning in response to the spread of COVID-19. Determined to carry forward with decades of interdisciplinary scholarly tradition and connection, UMass Amherst community members worked fast beginning on March 8 to transition the conference, also known as CUNY 2020, completely online.

Associate Professor Brian Dillon (top left) and other participants of CUNY 2020.

Led by Brian Dillon, associate professor in the UMass Amherst Department of Linguistics, a 24-person team of UMass and Five College faculty members, graduate students, and CUNY community members from other institutions worked quickly to cancel on-site arrangements, communicate with attendees and speakers, organize video and webinar technology, and move the conference online in ten days. No small feat, as the team had been planning the physical conference since the summer of 2018. “Our decision to cancel had the full support of the Provost and event services, and this support was critical in allowing to cancel as early as we did,” said Dillon.

Dillon, who hasn’t missed a CUNY conference since 2006, emphasized that this feat was “very definitely” a team effort. “One person whose work should be especially recognized is Jon Burnsky. Jon is a PhD student in Psychological and Brain Sciences here, and he is our official CUNY Graduate RA. He did a lot of work to set up live-streaming for the physical conference; his work laid the groundwork for our virtual conference. We were able to virtualize so quickly because of the work he had put in ahead of time,” said Dillon.

The online format added an unexpected tone of lightheartedness and relief to many experiencing serious disruption in their lives. “I was surprised at how connected this allowed us to feel,” recalls Dillon. “This allowed us to feel like we were making connections and giving a sense of community and normalcy in difficult times.” “It was also just plain fun in ways I hadn’t expected,” he said, feeling at times like he and the co-organizers were “thrown into the role of radio show host, rather than organizers of an academic conference. We would banter, crack jokes, take questions from the audience during downtime. It allowed for a sense of levity that I think some participants appreciated at this moment.”

People from 44 countries participated in CUNY 2020. “The top four were the USA, Germany, the UK, and China,” said Dillon. “The large Chinese participation is notable because of the 12-hour time difference. Chinese colleagues reported staying up late into the night to catch talks.”

One conference attendee and session chair, Colin Phillips, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland and Director of the Maryland Language Science Center, called Dillon’s leadership of CUNY 2020, “an incredible success.”

“The conference normally draws 200-300 in-person attendees,” said Phillips. “There was a broad concern that few people would want to participate in the remote format. In contrast, over 1,000 people took part over the course of the 3 days, with peak participation of 300-350 simultaneous participants in some sessions.” According to Phillips, about 20 people at the University of Maryland participated in a virtual watch party and communicated through the remote workplace communication tool, Slack. Because of this, Phillips explained, “the conference even helped us feel more connected locally. We heard of various other similar activities at other institutions.”

Reflecting on the unique and challenging circumstances facing universities during the COVID-19 crisis, Phillips went on to say, “The past couple of weeks have seen unprecedented changes in how universities operate. It seems like everything is changing from day to day. Brian and the UMass team made people feel that they were connected, despite the upheaval. But they also made people feel like they were witnessing something special that they hadn’t seen before. This conference has built up a strong following in its 33 years. Many people, myself included, have attended almost all of them. At this point I think there’s little doubt that this was the most memorable of them all.”

The CUNY conference, which was originally founded at the City University of New York Graduate Center by Janet Dean Fodor, is a major event in the psycholinguistics subfield of linguistics (it is now primarily hosted by other institutions, but retains the name). It is highly interdisciplinary, with strong contributions from researchers in Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Education, and Philosophy. “It is one of the central North American venues for researchers interested in psycholinguistics,” explains Dillon, “it is well attended by both linguists and by psychologists, and creates lots of productive interdisciplinary cross-talk.”

“UMass Amherst is a special place to host CUNY for many reasons,” said Dillon. “First, we have a very strong tradition in psycholinguistics. Our community goes back to the late 70’s and early 80’s, lead by researchers in psychology (Chuck Clifton Jr., Keith Rayner, Alexander Pollatsek, and Jerry Myers), and in linguistics (Lyn Frazier, Tom Roeper).” The UMass Amherst linguistics department, ranked No. 2 worldwide, is known for having a strong psycholinguistics program, and, “hosting CUNY further increases our community’s visibility,” said Dillon.

The UMass Amherst community has been involved with the CUNY conference since the beginning, but this is the first year that the campus has hosted since 1993. “Back then,” remarks Dillon, “incidentally, our conference coincided with a famous blizzard that stranded many people and prevented them from coming to the conference.”