Category: Student News

LRC VISITOR FILIPPA LINDAHL

Filippa Lindahl is a visiting graduate student in the department this year, under the auspices of the LRC. WHASC spoke to Filippa about herself, her research and her plans for her time in Santa Cruz.

WHASC: Could you tell us something about your background, Filippa—how you came to linguistics and so on?

Filippa Lindahl: I actually started out thinking I was going to become a librarian, but got more and more interested in language and grammar. I studied Swedish at the University of Gothenburg, and had Elisabet Engdahl and Lars-Gunnar Andersson as professors. After that I was basically hooked and decided to apply to the PhD program.

WHASC: Could you give us a sense of what questions interest you or what your research program is?

FL: My dissertation project, which I am just about to start, is on relative clause extraction in Swedish, and more specifically on what role information structure could play in relative clause extraction. I’m also interested in placement of object pronouns, and in learning more about how structures with preposed objects are processed.

WHASC: What brought you to Santa Cruz?

FL: I was very helpfully nudged in this direction by Elisabet.

WHASC: What do you hope to get done while you’re here—academically and beyond?

FL: Right now, I’m collecting data for my dissertation and am planning to start writing during my stay, but I also want to use as much of my time as possible to participate in classes and seminars. One thing I’m hoping to do while I’m here is to learn more about psycholinguistics and experimental work. I am also working hard on introducing Swedish fika in the Cave.

WHASC: Well, good luck with that and everything else.

CUSP 6 AT BERKELEY

CUSP 6 was held on Friday Oct 11 and Saturday Oct 12 on the campus of UC Berkeley. Donka Farkas went along and describes the event this way:

Lots of good papers, a lively audience, great discussion. UCSC was represented on the program by Karen Duek, talking about the polysemy of container pseudo-partitives. Great paper, very well delivered. In the audience there was LRC visitor Filippa Lindahl and a record number of faculty: Adrian Brasoveanu, Amy Rose Deal, myself and Maziar Toosarvandani. Alumni Chris Potts (Stanford) and Line Mikkelsen (Berkeley) were also there.

CAROLYNN JIMENEZ PRESENTING AT INT6

Carolynn Jimenez is pursuing a joint major in Computer Science and Linguistics at UCSC, planning to graduate in 2014. She is also a UC LEADS Scholar and is this year’s Chapter President of the UCSC Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.

This week Carolynn will be traveling to the INT6 Workshop (Intelligent Narrative Technologies) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta to present a paper: Dammit to Jotunheim: Increasing Author Leverage with Expressive Natural Language Generation . Carolynn is one of six co-authors of the paper (the others being her advisor Marilyn Walker, along with Jennifer Sawyer, Grace Lin, Elena Rishes and Noah Wardrip-Fruin).

Carolynn says about the paper she will present: I’ve been doing research with Marilyn Walker and the Natural Language Dialogue Systems Lab for a little over a year through a state funded fellowship (UC LEADS). This project comes from work we did for an NSF funded project called Character Creator. The paper itself grows out of a user study where we had expert and non-expert authors evaluate algorithmically generated dialogue with quantitative and qualitative methods.

MORGAN IN AIX-MARSEILLE

Adam Morgan graduated with the MA in Spring 2013 and is now in the PhD program in Psychology at UC San Diego, working in the Language Production Lab. Adam travelled to the University of Aix-Marseille in early September to present joint research with Matt Wagers (on resumption in English) at the annual AMLaP conference (Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing). AMLaP is an international conference which has established itself as the premier European venue for interdisciplinary research into how people process language. Adam and Matt’s poster (Gap Acceptability Predicts Resumption Rates in English) is available in PDF format here.

The research was well-received in a spectacular setting. Adam and Matt’s poster is in the right foreground, with the emblematic banana slug just visible at the top left corner.

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY FOR UNDERGRADUATES

Dom Massaro, Professor of Psychology and architect of Baldi, a computer-animated talker, has a new research opportunity for undergraduates on relating ease of articulation to children’s vocabulary acquisition. The goal is to mine existing databases that consist of vocabulary development across the first years of life and relate these results to metrics of ease of articulation. Theoretical questions include testing the motor theory of speech perception and whether a similar representation for receptive and expressive language can be assumed. Students would enroll in Psychology 194 (Advanced Research In Special Projects). Dom can be reached at Massaro@ucsc.edu.

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