Category: Alumni News

Aaron White receives NSF CAREER award

 

Aaron White

Professor Aaron White

Aaron White (BA, 2009), who is currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Rochester, just received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. This prestigious award, which is jointly supported by the Linguistics program and the Robust Intelligence program, will support his work on logical form induction:

This project develops a framework for integrating complex logical reasoning capabilities into the components of AI systems that make their ability to reason by analogy possible. To support the development of this framework, the project builds a large dataset capturing the logical relationships among sentences in three languages by using AI systems to determine which kinds of logical relationships are most useful for improving that system’s own logical reasoning capabilities. Through integration with graduate and undergraduate curricula, the project serves as a vehicle to enhance programming and statistical literacy as well as data collection and data management skills through training with hands-on applications.

The framework integrates logical representations into AI systems by imposing constraints on the sorts of numeric representations that those systems use to make inferences on the basis of some natural language input. These constraints are defined in terms of a mapping from the system’s numeric representations of natural language to logical representations. This mapping is learned from scratch and itself constrained (a) to correctly predict inferences that actual speakers of a language make — as captured by the large-scale datasets collected under the project — and (b) to be compositional: the meaning of some piece of language must be predictable from the meanings of its parts.

Congratulations, Aaron!

Another successful LASC

On March 6, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students and current students, faculty and alumni. The program included presentations by several graduate students and alumna Anya Hogoboom (PhD, 2006), now Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary. 

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, and sparked lively and insightful discussion during the Q & A:

  • Jack Duff led off the presentations with a talk on “Restricted restriction in the relative clauses of Santiago Laxopa Zapotec.”
  • Niko Webster followed with a talk on “Eventive nominals in Korean and the nature of argument structure.”
  • Lalitha Balachandran and Morwenna Hoeks presented a talk entitled “Does memory for focus structure interfere with memory for prosody?”
  • Dan Brodkin concluded the student presentations with his work on “Locality and extraction in Mandar.”

The Distinguished Alumna Speaker was Professor Anya Hogoboom, whose presentation “Making sense of word-final strength and weakness” argued that strong and weak behavior in final syllables is sensitive to word-final lengthening and is dependent on the role of duration in the phonological phenomenon. 

The LASC dinner and celebration that followed, on the lawn at the Cowell Provost House, was marked by delightful conversations, excellent food, and sweeping views of the Monterey Bay. 

Thank you to all of the students, staff, and faculty who contributed to making this event a success!

LASC presenters

LASC presenters pictured from left to right: Dan Brodkin, Jack Duff, Morwenna Hoeks, Lalitha Balachandran, Niko Webster, and Anya Hogoboom.

UCSC Linguists at the 2023 LSA Linguistic Institute

The 2023 LSA Linguistic Institute, “Linguistics as Cognitive Science: Universality and Variation,” will be held June 19-July 14 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Two of the Institute’s courses will be taught by UC Santa Cruz faculty or alumni: Field Psycholinguistics (course 220) will be taught by Professor Matt Wagers and Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara (PhD, 2020) and Advanced Pragmatics (course 211) will be taught by Maria Biezma and Kyle Rawlins (PhD, 2008).

Banana slugs at CAMP

On the weekend of January 28-29, several UC Santa Cruz psycholinguists presented at this year’s California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP), hosted by UCLA. The conference attendees included graduate students and post-docs from all over the state conducting research in language processing. In addition to Professors Matthew Wagers and Amanda Rysling each chairing a session, the talk schedule was infested with banana slugs:

Long talks:

  • Does memory for focus structure interfere with memory for prosody? Lalitha Balachandran & Morwenna Hoeks
  • Is phonotactic repair of onset clusters modulated by listener expectations? Max Kaplan
  • The Subject-Object Asymmetry in Embedded Questions: Evidence from the Maze, Matthew Kogan
  • Turkish relative clauses and the role of syntactic connectivity in agreement attraction, Elifnur Ulusoy

Poster talks:

Also in attendance were UCSC alumni Ben Eischens (PhD, 2022), Steven Foley (PhD, 2020), and Kelsey Sasaki (PhD, 2021).

 

linguists at camp

From left: Matthew Wagers, Steven Foley, Kelsey Sasaki, Sophia Stremel, Morwenna Hoeks, Max Kaplan, Stephanie Rich, Jack Duff, Lalitha Balachandran, Matthew Kogan, Elifnur Ulusoy, Vishal Arvindam, Amanda Rysling

Jed Pizarro-Guevara receives NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship

Jed

Jed Pizarro-Guevara

Jed Pizarro-Guevara, who received his PhD from UCSC in 2020, has been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. During the two-year fellowship, he will continue as a member of Professor Brian Dillon’s psycholinguistics lab at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jed’s dissertation, When human universal meets language specific, was advised by Professor Matt Wagers. His work focuses on sentence processing in a variety of languages, most significantly Tagalog. Check out a description of the project, as well as related project he’s working on, below:

 

My current project (NSF SPRF #2204112) looks at reflexive processing in Tagalog: when Tagalog comprehenders interpret reflexives in real-time, to what extent do they attend to potential antecedents that are not licensed by the grammar? What types of linguistic information do they leverage to guide their interpretation? I’ll be using the visual world paradigm to investigate these questions. I’m currently running large-scale interpretation studies that look at the binding possibilities of reflexive pronouns in the language. These interpretation studies will form the empirical backbone of the visual world studies that I’ll be deploying  at the University of the Philippines Diliman later this year (probably around August/September) and the year after (most likely around the same time). I haven’t been back since summer 2019, so I’m super excited about this research trip. I also get to take a grad student RA with me to assist with data collection. That should be fun! I can’t wait to introduce them to the wonderful people (and food!!) over there! 😄

 

Sort of related to this project is a collaboration I have with Özge Bakay. We’re conceptually replicating Dillon et al. 2013, which used eye-tracking while reading to compare interference effects in English subject-verb and anaphoric dependencies. This is particularly exciting for me because first, I get to work with undergrads again! They’re helping us make the visual world counterpart of the Dillon et al study. Second, we’ll be collecting data using an in-lab eye-tracker and a more portable eye-tracker, like the one that Matt and Maziar have used in z/lab [sentence processing work on Zapotec]! There’s obvious differences between the two (e.g., price, sampling rate, etc.), so we wanted to do an explicit comparison to see how qualitatively similar/comparable the data will be. We will begin data collection this Spring semester (or at least that’s the goal), so stay tuned!
Congrats, Jed!

Eric Potsdam inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America

Eric Potsdam Profile

Professor Eric Potsdam

PhD alumnus Eric Potsdam, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Florida, was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, along with seven of the field’s most eminent linguists. The LSA states that each fellow is inducted “for their distinguished contributions to the discipline.” 

Professor Potsdam received his PhD from the Department in 1996, with a thesis on imperatives, chaired by Professor Judith Aissen. Since then, he has made important contributions to many areas in linguistics and syntactic theory, including ellipsis, exceptives, and the grammar of Austronesian languages. Congratulations, Eric!

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