Elliott Moreton*
UNC Chapel Hill
Syntagmatic simplicity bias in human and artificial learners
In collaboration with Joe Pater and Michael Becker** (Reed College)
Friday, February 20, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-23
Refreshments to follow in the department lounge
*2002 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD
**2009 UMass Amherst Linguistics PhD
WHISC has a long tradition of collaboration graphs:
They've become quite out of date, though. With the help of statnet, we now have a nice system for generating and updating them, so we'll be rolling out 2009 versions over the coming weeks. Below is the first: a graph of faculty collaborations on papers and grant projects. The graph is connected; you can travel from any faculty member to any other faculty member.
Documentation below.
Continue reading "UMass Amherst Faculty Collaboration Graph" »
Elliott Moreton (this week's colloq speaker) will be in the department today and tomorrow (Feb 19 and 20). Today, he is speaking in Joe's Seminar on Models of Phonological Learning (Thursday, Feb 19, 1:00-2:15 pm, Hasbrouck Lab 106). He will also be available for meetings and lunches. Contact Emily for more details.
[Thanks Emily!]
Syntax Reading Group meets today (Feb 19), 8:00 pm, in Northampton. The week's reading:
Kennedy, Christopher and Jason Merchant. 2000. Attributive comparative deletion. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18:89-146.
An article by Karen Jesney and alumna Anne-Michelle Tessier (PhD 2007; Assistant Prof at Alberta) has been accepted for publication in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. This article, 'Biases in Harmonic Grammar: the road to restrictive learning', argues that Harmonic Grammar can explain many of the stipulated ranking biases that have been posited in the literature on language learning in OT.
[Thanks John!]
As we reported, Emily Elfner and Wendell Kimper gave a talk in the Hampshire College Cognitive Science lunch series last week (Feb 18). Here's a photo from the event:
[Thanks Kathryn!]
The Linguists, the documentary about the fieldwork of K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, premiers on PBS on Thursday, February 26. Click through the image below for a trailer.
[Thanks Peggy!]
Chuck Clifton gave a talk titled Making scalar implicatures yesterday (Feb 18), as part of the Psychology Cognitive Brown Bag series. (John Kingston spoke in the series last week.)
Continue reading "Psychology Talk: Clifton on Processing Scalar Implicatures" »
The Acquisition/Evidentials Group had a meeting, with socializing, on President's Day, at Laura Holland and Tom Roeper's house. Marco Fenici, a visitor from Siena Cognitive Science, presented 'Concepts and development'. Misato Hiraga presented 'Acquisition of recursive verbal compounds: experimental proposal'. And the group enjoyed lots of tasty potluck fare.
[Thanks Tom!]
PhG met last night (Feb 18) at Karen Jesney's house in Northampton. Thanks for hosting, Karen!
[Thanks Wendell!]
At the latest McCarthy-Pater NSF grant group meeting, John McCarthy presented some thoughts about a linear encoding of autosegmental representations. The goal is to come up with an encoding that can be easily incorporated into the on-going project of implementing Harmonic Serialism in Java -- including the full Gen and Eval components.
The discussion will continue on Wednesday, February 18, at 4:00 pm, in South College 301.
The CUNY Conference, held non-compositionally at UC Davis this year, will feature work by a number of UMass Amherst linguists:
Congratulations!
A bunch of UMass Amherst linguists are on the program at SALT 19 (and one of the organizers is Craige Roberts, 1986 UMass Amherst PhD):
Congratulations to all!
