As well as the previously announced plenary lectures by Gaja Jarosz and Mark Johnson, SCiL 2019 will feature a special panel on “What should linguists know about Natural Language Processing  and Machine Learning?”, and tutorials for linguists on selected aspects of NLP/ML.

The first tutorial will be offered by Allyson Ettinger (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago) and will be on vector space models for syntax and semantics. The second tutorial will be offered by Kasia Hitczenko and Laurel Perkins (University of Maryland, College Park) and will provide an introduction to Bayesian modeling, with an emphasis on applications in the domains of phonetics and phonology

The panelists will be Sam Bowman (Department of Linguistics and Center for Data Science, NYU), Chris Dyer (DeepMind), Allyson Ettinger (TTI), and Noah Smith (Computer Science and Engineering, Univerity of Washington). The special panel discussion will address the general topic communication across Linguistics and NLP/ML: what misconceptions there may be on both sides, how goals and evaluative criteria may differ or overlap, what training and skills are most important for pursuing NLP/ML research or career paths, and what to expect when seeking to establish cross-disciplinary collaborative research projects.

The panel and tutorials will occur during the regular LSA schedule (most likely Thursday Jan. 3rd), and will not require a special registration fee.

These special sessions, and the plenary session, were made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.