Category: Announcements

HUGRA awards support and encourage undergraduate research in the humanities. Up to 10 awards in the amount of $500 each are given each year. There are no constraints on the expenditure of the stipend. The top proposal receives the Bertha N. Melkonian prize, an additional $500. The deadline for HUGRA applications is March 1, 2012.

Any project involving research within or including any of the humanities disciplines is eligible for consideration. Proposals must be for research performed during the 2011-2012 academic year. Previous years’ awardees are not eligible to apply.

Proposals will be judged on the basis of:
a) intellectual substance
b) promise of results
c) preparation of applicant
d) feasibility

Application includes:

I) 1-3 page research proposal, describing the research problem to be addressed, what will be done in the project, and what end product (e.g. research paper, senior thesis, project report) is expected. A timetable should be included.

II) Application form (download here).

III) A letter of support from a faculty sponsor addressing items a) through d) above.

NOTE: The applicant is responsible for ensuring that the letter of support is submitted by the deadline.

A full-time RA/Lab Manager position is available at the Neuroscience of Language Lab at NYU (NeLLab) under the direction of Liina Pylkkanen and Alec Marantz. A BA/BS or MA/MS in a cognitive science-related discipline (psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, etc.) or computer science is required. The lab manager will be involved in all stages of the execution and analysis of MEG and EEG experiments on language processing. Previous experience with MEG or some other cognitive neuroscience method is a plus. A background in statistics and some programming ability (e.g., Matlab) are essential. Start date next summer, details negotiable. Interviews will start immediately; we hope to make an offer before March 15. To apply, please email CV and names of references to Prof. Liina Pylkkänen (liina.pylkkanen at nyu.edu).

Natural Language Technology is moving from text retrieval and search applications to tasks that require genuine understanding of natural language as well as the interaction between language understanding and reasoning. Within the linguistic computational world a common perspective has emerged on what is common to these natural language understanding tasks under the heading “textual inferencing”. This workshop on textual inferencing takes place at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information on March 9-10, 2012.

There will be a colloquium by Masaya Yoshida (Northwestern University) this Friday, February 3rd, at 4:00 pm, in Humanities 1, room 202. The title of the talk is “The real-time processing of Forward and Backward Sluicing”, and you can find the abstract here.

The Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Group invites students to their annual Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium, to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 14th-15th this year. The call for papers and a copy of the necessary registration form are hanging up outside the linguistics department office. The deadline for submitting abstracts is March 13th.

The department will offer two courses this summer: Introduction to Linguistics (to be taught by Bern Samko, and Semantics 1 (to be taught by Adrian Brasoveanu). Both courses will be offered in Summer Session 1, June 25 – July 27. Enrollment for summer courses starts April 16!