Computational & Mathematical Linguistics

Bob Frank has been awarded a grant by the NSF on the topic of “Inductive Biases for the Acquisition of Syntactic Transformations in Neural Networks.” This work, in collaboration with Tal Linzen of Johns Hopkins, will explore the degree to which explicit innate biases are needed to learn linguistic mappings, whether between linguistic forms (e.g., active/passive or declarative/interrogative) or between forms and meanings.

Many members of the Yale linguistics department made a mass exodus to the the recent LSA annual meeting in New York City, where they gave 19 oral and poster presentations at the main meeting, workshops, and sister society meetings. These included:

Results on syntax and phonology by Jim Wood, Matt Tyler, and Yiding Hao were showcased at the Penn Linguistics Conference in March.

Graduate students from Stony Brook University, NYU, and CUNY came to Yale University’s main campus in New Haven, Connecticut.

Results on TAG parsing and finite-state Optimality Theory were presented at TAG+, FSMNLP, and EMNLP.

As of today, Professor Claire Bowern will assume the role of full professor in the Department of Linguistics.

Throughout the month of April, Yale linguistics graduate students presented their qualifying papers in a series of Friday Lunch Talks.

Matt’s talk is “In Choctaw, everyone’s a clitic.” Rikker’s is “Prosodic context in computational modeling of tone: citation tones vs. running speech.” 

Tomorrow, lecturer Hadas Kotek is giving a talk, undergraduate alumna Maria Kouneli is presenting a paper, and former faculty member Gaja Jarosz is delivering a plenary talk.

Members of our department traveled all over the world for summer institutes, conferences, and fieldwork, and we hosted several visiting undergraduate researchers on campus.

We are delighted to have Sarah Babinski (Swarthmore ’16), Yiding Hao (UChicago ’15), Dan Schwennicke (Oxford ’16), and Andy Zhang (Yale ’15) join our department.

[Updated April 18, 2016]

On two Fridays, April 15 and April 22, Yale linguistics graduate students in their second and third years will give talks based on their qualifying papers. These papers, one of which is required in each of the second and third years and which cover two different areas of linguistics, represent significant original research culminating in a work of publishable quality.

Associate Professor Claire Bowern will be giving a plenary at the workshop Capturing Phylogenetic Algorithms for Linguistics, which will be held October 26-30, 2015, at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, Netherlands.

The paper, titled “Learning General Phonological Rules From Distributional Information: A Computational Model,” appears in the journal Cognitive Science.

Congratulations to our linguistics degree recipients!