Faculty member Ivano Caponigro is an invited speaker at the workshop on “Non-interrogative subordinate wh-clauses” at the University of Cologne (Germany) on February 7-8, 2020.

Faculty member Will Styler was invited to give a talk at UCLA’s Department of Linguistics on November 15th.

Title: Using Transparent Machine Learning to study Human Speech

Abstract:

Machine learning, the use of nuanced computer models to analyze and predict data, has a long history in speech recognition and natural language processing, but have largely been limited to more applied, engineering tasks. This talk will describe two more research-focused applications of transparent machine learning algorithms in the study of speech perception and production.

For speech perception, we’ll examine the difficult problem of identifying acoustic cues to a complex phonetic contrast, in this case, vowel nasality. Here, by training machine learning algorithms on acoustic measurements, we can more directly measure the informativeness of the various acoustic features to the contrast. This by-feature informativeness data was then used to create hypotheses about human cue usage, and then, to model the observed human patterns of perception, showing that these models were able to predict not only the utilized cue, but the subtle patterns of perception arising from less informative changes.

For speech production, we’ll focus on data from Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA), which provides position data for the articulators with high temporal and spatial resolution, and discuss our ongoing efforts to identify and characterize pause postures (specific vocal tract configurations at prosodic boundaries, c.f. Katsika et al. 2014) in the speech of 7 speakers of American English. Here, the lip aperture trajectories of 800+ individual pauses were gold-standard annotated by a member of the research team, and then subjected to principal component analysis. These analyses were then used to train a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, which achieved a 96% classification accuracy in cross-validation tests, with a Cohen’s Kappa showing machine-to-annotator agreement of 0.79, suggesting the potential for improvements in speed, consistency, and objective characterization of gestures.

These methods of modeling feature importance and classifying curves using transparent and interpretable machine learning both demonstrate concrete methods which are potentially useful and applicable to a variety of questions in phonetics, and potentially, in linguistics in general.

Faculty member Michelle Yuan just published a new paper on “Dependent case and clitic dissimilation in Yimas” in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.

Faculty member Eva Wittenberg is giving two talks in Europe, representing  her lab‘s cross-linguistic work.

The first talk (on November 5th) will take place at the conference Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning (X-PPL) in Zurich, and Eva will present joint work with Ashwini Vaidya (IIT Delhi) on processing light verbs in Hindi in the their talk Practice makes perfect: Frequency of language-wide predicational strategy eases processing cost in Hindi light verb constructions.

The second talk (on November 9th) will take place at the 14. Bayerisch-Österreichischen Dialektologentagung in Salzburg, where Eva and her collaborator Andreas Trotzke will talk about their work on a variety of Bavarian: Mogst a weng a Schnitzala? Eine psycholinguistische Untersuchung zur referenziellen Verkleinerungsfunktion in ostfränkischen Nominalphrasen. (‘Would you like a little schnitzl? A psycholinguistic study about the referential function in East Franconian noun phrases’).

Our faculty member Eva Wittenberg is presenting joint work with Jacopo Romoli (University of Ulster) and Paolo Santorio (University of Maryland at College Park) on Fixing DeMorgan’s Law in Counterfactual Antecedents at the Amsterdam Colloquium on December 18-20, 2019.

Our faculty member Ivano Caponigro has been invited to give three talks at the NINJAL-UHM Linguistics Workshop on Syntax-Semantics Interface, Language Acquisition, and Naturalistic Data Analysis at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa on October 11-13, 2019.

• Richard Montague: The Simplicity of Language, the Complexity of Life. Towards a Biography (plenary talk)
• Investigating Headless Relative Clauses across Languages: Why and How (workshop)
  
• Investigating Headless Relative Clauses across languages: A view from Mesoamerica (plenary talk)
  

Our faculty member Gabriela Caballero is giving three invites talks the next few months:

• a colloquium talk on Tone and inflection in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara): implications for the typology and theory of grammatical tone in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University on November 8, 2019;
• a presentation for a joint meeting of the Georgetown University Fieldwork Forum (GUFF) and the computational linguistics group on November 8, 2019;
• an invited talk at the Princeton Phonology Forum (PɸF 2020) on Tone and phonological theory at Princeton University on April 10-11, 2020.

Emily Clem and Michelle Yuan, our two new faculty members who are specialized in syntax and field work, and Eva Wittenberg, our recent hire in psycholinguistics, are all presenting at the prestigious and highly selective conference NELS 50 at MIT in Cambridge, MA on October 25-27, 2019. Emily is giving a talk on Post-syntactic altruism with her co-authors Nicholas Rolle and Virginia Dawson, Michelle is giving a talk on Deriving variation in ergativity across Eskimo-Aleut, and Eva is giving a talk on Fixing De Morgan’s law in counterfactual antecedents with her co-authors Jacopo Romoli and Paolo Santorio.