Category: Announcements

The Institute for Creative Technologies offers paid 12-week summer internships for undergraduate and graduate students. Summer interns work on a variety of projects, receive a competitive salary, and may qualify for an additional travel and housing allowance if they come from outside Los Angeles. The deadline for student applications, including one letter of reference, is February 19.

Due to the way the selection process works at ICT, it is advantageous for an applicant to list 3 projects on their application form even if they are only interested in (or feel qualified for) one project. Here are the relevant links:

List of projects
Application form

Students should look over all the projects before applying, but here are some projects which may be suitable specifically for linguistics students (the last four for students who are also strong programmers):

12130 Pashto Language Processing (requires familiarity with Pashto)
12131 Natural Language Annotation/Transcription
12137 Natural Language Processing
12138 Virtual Human Dialogue Evaluation
12139 Applying Theoretical Pragmatics in Virtual Human Dialogue Systems
12141 Spoken Language Understanding for Conversational Dialogue Systems
12142 Incrementally Responsive Virtual Humans
12143 Development of Authoring Tools for Conversational Characters
12145 Virtual Patient

For some time, members of the department have been meeting as a Corpus Linguistics Group, organized by Adrian Brasoveanu. This endeavor is now evolving into Language, Logic & Cognition (LaLoCo) lab. The overarching goal of LaLoCo is to the establish and solidify connections between a) detailed, formally sophisticated linguistic theories – formal semantics theories in particular, and b) modern methods of data analysis and cognitive models of learning and processing abstract, highly structured representations of the kind deployed in formal semantics and generative linguistics more broadly. To learn more and to stay posted on developments, go here.

The CUIP is now accepting applications for the 2012-2013 academic year! CUIP provides on-campus internships in administrative departments throughout the campus. Interns work with a mentor to develop personal and professional skills, and take a leading role in producing a product or result in their one-year internship. For example: interns have worked with the campus-wide recycling programs, on a department newsletters or web pages, and even policy recommendation reports. Interns also attend a two-unit leadership seminar in fall and spring quarters. A stipend of 8,200 dollars is paid towards the intern’s registration fees for the academic year!

CUIP is a unique opportunity to learn, earn, and serve. To start an application and to get the list of internships, or get answers to frequently asked questions, visit the CUIP web site for more information. The application deadline is Thursday, February 16, 2012. If you have questions email cuip@ucsc.edu or call 459-3973.

The Cognition and Language Workshop (CLaW), which takes place at the University of California, Santa Barbara, April 14 2012, invites abstracts for talks involving the relation between language and cognition. They welcome talks that investigate language as a cognitive activity as well as talks investigating cognition as a dimension of language. Talks may involve any area of linguistics – phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, computational linguistics, and others.

The deadline for abstracts is Monday, February 13, 2012. To find out more, visit the CLaW web site.

The 7th North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC7) will be held May 4-5, 2012 at Concordia University in Montreal. They welcome abstracts for talks of 40 minutes (including questions) on any aspect of generative phonology, including the interface of phonology (or lack thereof) with morphology, syntax, phonetics or semantics. Abstracts are due February 1st. Further information will be made available at the conference website.

The q Undergraduate Association for Linguistics at Michigan State (qUALMS) is proud to announce the second annual Great Lakes Expo for Experimental and Formal Undergraduate Linguistics (GLEEFUL) on April 21, 2012. GLEEFUL aims to bring together undergraduate linguists from across the continent to present high-quality research to their peers. Dr. David Pesetsky, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be the keynote speaker.

The conference invites 1 page abstracts (500 words) for 10 minute presentations or posters from any area of linguistics. Abstract submission and registration will all be done electronically through the website, available through https://sites.google.com/site/gleeful2012/ (via the ‘Submission’ link in the left navigation).

Deadline for submission of abstract: January 22, 2012. For further information, you can send an email to gleeful.2012@gmail.com, or check out the GLEEFUL website.