Category: Student News

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.

MATT TUCKER DEFENDS DISSERTATION

Matt Tucker successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on Thursday June 6th before a committee consisting of Sandy Chung, Jorge Hankamer and Jim McCloskey. Matt’s dissertation is on the syntax of Maltese and the department was honored to welcome representatives of the Maltese community in the Bay Area to the dissertation defense, including the Honorable Louis J. Vella, who is Honorary Consul General of Malta in San Francisco for Northern California and the States of Nevada, Oregon and Hawaii.

Matt has also now accepted an appointment as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at NYU: Abu Dhabi. Matt will be working directly with Diogo Almeida as a part of the NYU Neuroscience of Language team, which includes Alec Marantz, Liina Pylkkanen and David Poeppel. The Abu Dhabi group focuses on ways to leverage the rich linguistic environment of the United Arab Emirates to study questions about linguistic knowledge and language processing, with a particular focus on the linguistics of the Semitic languages.

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