Yale linguists present at ACL
Seven Yale linguists presented six posters and two invited talks, highlighting their own research as well as projects from CLAY.
Seven Yale linguists presented six posters and two invited talks, highlighting their own research as well as projects from CLAY.
Noah Macey (Linguistics ‘09) reports on a new pilot American Sign Language (ASL) program at Yale, with courses taught by Jessica Tanner. The pilot program begins in the spring, when the university will offer two ASL classes through the Linguistics Department, which petitioned the Language Study Committee last spring for the course’s approval.
Katie Martin (Yale ‘18) published a Slate article called “How ‘Sounding White’ Helps Get You Ahead—on Film and in Real Life”. The piece is about linguistic prejudice and also talks a little bit about the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, which Katie contributed to.
Emily Finn (Yale ‘09) published a NYTimes article called “How I learned to stop worrying and love linguistics”.
Members of the Pama-Nyungan lab recently published a write-up of their results on forced alignment algorithms. Their paper on “A Robin Hood approach to forced alignment: English-trained algorithms and their use on Australian languages” was recently published in the proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. They show that for some purposes, English-trained models can be used without crucial loss of accuracy.
This year again, for the 6th consecutive year, the Linguistics Department has invited middle and high school students to hone their analytical skills while working on linguistic problems and training for the NACLO competition. We have done so by hosting training sessions for NACLO, on Sunday afternoons, led by a group of our undergraduate students (Andrew Benz, David Gold, Chloe Gonzalez, Helena Lyng-Olsen and Kento Tanaka), with the help of two faculty members (Jason Shaw and Raffaella Zanuttini).
The ASL pilot program proves to be a resounding success as all spots in Jessica Tanner’s introductory-level course are filled.
American Sign Languages will be taught at the L1 and L2 levels during the upcoming Spring Term by Jessica Tanner.
Scholars from a wide range of institutions and disciplines came to Yale to discuss the cognitive foundations of variation and change in meaning.
Results on TAG parsing and finite-state Optimality Theory were presented at TAG+, FSMNLP, and EMNLP.