Academic Talks – Linguistics Advising at UW

18th Annual UW UG Research Symposium – Call for submissions

lingadv — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 18:36:55 +0000

18th Annual UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, which will be on Friday, May 15, 2015, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm in Mary Gates Hall.

To present their work at this event, students must submit an application by Monday, February 23rd, 2015. For further details, including a list of information sessions about the Symposium and abstract writing workshops to assist students with their applications, visit: http://www.uw.edu/undergradresearch/symposium/.

The Symposium is a celebration of undergraduate accomplishments in research, scholarship, and creative expression in all academic disciplines. Students may present their research either in a poster session or an oral presentation session. We will also have a dedicated performance space in nearby Meany Hall for performing arts presentations and a visual arts and design showcase in Odegaard Undergraduate Library. Last year, 1,100 students participated in this exciting event.

The 34th UW/MS Symposium in Computational Linguistics

lingadv — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 18:18:40 +0000

Microsoft Research and University of Washington

Time: 3:30-5PM, Fri 11/14/2014

Location: Miller 301 at UW (Go to http://www.washington.edu/maps/ and search for “Miller”)

Come take advantage of this opportunity to connect with the computational
linguistics community at Microsoft and the University of Washington. This
is a regular opportunity for computational linguists at the University of
Washington and at Microsoft to discuss topics in the field and to connect
in a friendly informal atmosphere. We will have two talks (see below),
followed by informal mingling.

Natural Language Semantics by Combining Logical and Distributional Methods using Probabilistic Logic

Raymond J. Mooney, UT Austin / Microsoft Research

Traditional logical approaches to semantics and newer distributional or
vector space approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses.We have
developed methods that integrate logical and distributional models by using
a CCG-based parser to produce a detailed logical form for each sentence,
and combining the result with soft inference rules derived from
distributional semantics that connect the meanings of their component words
and phrases. For recognizing textual entailment (RTE) we use Markov Logic
Networks (MLNs) to combine these representations and we present results on
standard corpora emphasizing the advantages of combining logical structure
of sentences with statistical knowledge mined from large corpora.

Raymond J. Mooney is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at
the University of Texas at Austin, but currently on leave at Microsoft
Research. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Illinois at
Urbana/Champaign. He is an author of over 150 published research papers,
primarily in the areas of machine learning and natural language processing.
He was the President of the International Machine Learning Society from
2008-2011, program co-chair for AAAI 2006, general chair for HLT-EMNLP
2005, and co-chair for ICML 1990. He is a Fellow of the American
Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing
Machinery, and the recipient of best paper awards from AAAI-96, KDD-04,
ICML-05 and ACL-07.

Combined Distributional and Logical Semantics

Mike Lewis, UW CSE / Allen Institute for AI

I will describe a new approach to semantics, which combines the benefits of
formal semantics and distributional approaches. Formal semantics offers an
elegant account of composition and logical operators, but typically shows
low recall due to inadequate models of lexical semantics. Conversely,
distributional semantics has been successful in describing the meanings of
content words, but it is unclear how to effectively represent composition
and function words in a vector space. I will introduce a model which
closely follows formal semantics, except that content words are represented
with distributional cluster-identifiers. I will show that it is capable of
both complex multi-sentence first-order inferences, while improving
performance on a question-answering task. I will then describe a
semi-supervised extension for building a richer lexical semantics.

Mike Lewis is a postdoc at the University of Washington and Allen AI,
working with Luke Zettlemoyer and Oren Etzioni. Previously, he completed a
PhD at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Mark Steedman, and has a
Masters degree from Oxford University. He is interested in wide coverage
semantic and syntactic parsing, particularly in methods combining
Combinatory Categorical Grammar with unsupervised or semi-supervised
learning.

UW Linguistics Colloquium this Friday 11/17

lingadv — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:10:39 +0000

Dept. of Linguistics Colloquium
Friday, 11/7/14
3:30 – 5:00 PM
Miller 301

Speaker: Scott L. Montgomery
Affiliate Faculty member in the Jackson School of International Studies

Abstract: English, as we’ve often heard, has become a global language.
Nowhere, however, has this advanced as far as in the natural sciences, where
English dominates the international dimension at every level. The reality,
in fact, brings forward a number of issues and questions. First, what
indicators convince us this has truly happened? Second, what unique
linguistic phenomena have emerged as a result? Third, what advantages and
disadvantages does it have, for science, for other languages, and for
individual speakers? Fourth, is there a geopolitical dimension involved,
e.g. is the status of English wholly tied to the status of the U.S.? Fifth,
and finally, does history provide any guide to what we might expect in the
near future? Answering these questions is necessary before we can understand
this new era in scientific communication and what it suggests with regard to
language policies and education around the world.

Careers in the Tech Industry for Non-Tech Students

lingadv — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 17:59:24 +0000

Employer Panel

Thursday, October 16, 4:30 – 6:30 PM, HUB 214

Have you been thinking that you would like to carve out a career in the tech world, but don’t have computer or engineering skills? Many high-tech firms have jobs and careers that are not tech related. This employer panel will help you become aware of what those jobs/careers might be and how best to apply for them. There will be time for the audience to ask questions to the panelists and the opportunity to mix and mingle after the presentation. Employers from Amazon, Simply Measured, Tableau, and Mu-Sigma will be present.

No RSVP needed. Questions? Email crecruit@uw.edu

Call for Abstracts – Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium

lingadv — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 17:29:16 +0000

The UnderLings, the undergraduate linguistics association of Cornell
University, requests abstract submissions for the 8th annual Cornell
Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium.

The Colloquium will take place April 25th-27th, 2014. We encourage
submissions at all levels in a variety of subfields of linguistics,
including but not limited to phonetics, phonology, syntax, historical
linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.
Applicants pursuing a B.A., B.S., or equivalent degree are invited to
submit a one-page abstract for a talk of no more than twenty minutes in
length or for a poster presentation at our poster session. Abstracts should
be submitted to culc@cornell.edu by March 10th. Please indicate whether you
would like to be considered for a talk, for the poster session or for both.
Submitters will be notified by March 17th whether the abstract was accepted
or rejected.

There is a probability that the conference proceedings will be published
afterward, most likely in an online, widely-accessible format. More
information about the Colloquium may be found at the following website:
http://linguistics.cornell.edu/undergraduate/undergrad-colloquium.cfm

Please direct any questions or concerns to culc@cornell.edu.

Present your research at the 3rd annual Linguistics Department Undergraduate Research Colloquium!

lingadv — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 21:59:43 +0000

We are planning to have our 3rd Annual Linguistics Department Undergraduate Research Colloquium on Friday, March 7th. This is your opportunity to present your research to a group of your linguistics peers, graduate students, and faculty! Students who have worked on their own projects as well as those who worked with faculty on linguistics research within or outside of the Linguistics Department are invited to participate. The format will be similar to a linguistics conference, with time for verbal presentations and a poster presentation session.

Please note that you don’t need to have your project 100% complete to present your work – even if you haven’t completed your analysis, you can discuss your research question(s), hypotheses, methods, initial results, etc. You also don’t necessarily have to be registered for LING 499 for research to present – in the past, we’ve had some students give very interesting presentations on the work they were doing for one of their classes. Conference presentations look great on a resume or CV, so presenting your research is also a great way to improve your chances of finding a job or getting into graduate school.

If you are interested in participating in the colloquium with either a poster or verbal presentation, please email me your interest by Sunday, February 2ndat lingadv@uw.edu. There are limited verbal presentation slots and these are first come first serve, so please let me know as soon as possible if you would prefer a verbal presentation.

-Katie

The 31st UW/MS Symposium in Computational Linguistics

lingadv — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 21:09:13 +0000

Microsoft Research and University of Washington

Date: Friday 11/1/2013
Time: 3:30-5PM
Place: Microsoft, Building 99, 1919
14820 NE 36th Street
Redmond, WA 98052
http://binged.it/14DwYYY

Come take advantage of this opportunity to connect with the computational
linguistics community at Microsoft and the University of Washington. This is
a regular opportunity for computational linguists at the University of
Washington and at Microsoft to discuss topics in the field and to connect in
a friendly informal atmosphere. We will have two talks (see below), followed
by informal mingling.

******

Woodley Packard and Emily M. Bender: Predicting the Scope of Negation using Minimal Recursion Semantics

Joint work with: Jonathon Read (Teesside University), Stephan Oepen
(University of Oslo & Potsdam University), Rebecca Dridan (University of
Oslo)

Abstract: Negation is a pervasive phenomenon in natural language, occurring in every
language and every genre. Despite the obviously profound impact of negation
on the meaning of a sentence, the most common approach to handling negation
in NLP systems is to ignore it, leading to all manner of (frequently)
comical errors. To encourage the exploration of better solutions, the 2012
*SEM Shared Task focused (among other things) on automatically identifying
negation and determining its scope. Several of the resulting systems were
quite successful, but despite the semantic nature of the task, the vast
majority of them were based on surface or syntactic methods.

In this talk, we will describe a semantics-based method of attacking the
same problem. Our system is based on the Minimal Recursion Semantics
structures produced by the English Resource Grammar, a broad-coverage,
precision, computational HPSG account of English. We show that it is
relatively straightforward to design high precision rules to determine what
portion of a sentence is within the scope of negation, by “crawling” through
these graphs. In a system combination with the winner of the 2012
competition, our method yields improved precision and F1. Moreover, our
“crawling” rules can be seen as a first-pass formalization of the shared
task annotation guidelines.

Author Bios:
Woodley Packard is currently a CLMS student at the University of Washington.
Since completing his M.S. and B.S. in Mathematics at Stanford University in
2006, he spent three years at a web technology startup, and has also spent
time at the University of Oslo in Norway. He is also the author of the ACE
parser-generator and various other experimental NLP tools.

Emily M. Bender is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Adjunct
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of
Washington. She is the Faculty Director of UW’s Professional Masters Program
in Computational Linguistics (CLMS). Her research interests center on
multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics, and the
relationship between linguistics and computational linguistics. Her book,
_Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials
from Morphology and Syntax_ appeared this year in Morgan & Claypool’s
Synthesis Lectures in Human Language Technologies.

************************************

Margaret Mitchell: Generating human reference to visible objects

Abstract: In this talk, I will detail some previous work on how people refer to
everyday objects in real world settings, and discuss how to model this in a
generation system that produces humanlike descriptions. This talk will tie
in aspects of linguistics, cognitive science, and statistical natural
language processing.

Bio: Margaret Mitchell received her Master’s from the University of Washington’s
CLMA program and her PhD at the University of Aberdeen. She also spent
several years at Oregon Health and Science University as a visiting scholar.
Her research has recently focused on connecting vision to language.

Linguistics 50th Anniversary Keynote Speech 06/07/13 – Ellen Kaisse

lingadv — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:56:10 +0000

University of Washington Linguistics Department 50th Anniversary

KEYNOTE SPEECH

Dialects of Spanish and of Modern Greek – Natural Laboratories for the Generative Phonologist
Professor Ellen Kaisse

University of Washington
Friday, June 7, 2013
3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
SAV 260

Modern Greek is not spoken over a wide swath of the globe, but the geography of Greece, with its many islands and mountains, provides a wealth of data for the dialectologist and for the phonologist. Spanish, spoken all over Central and Southern America as well as on the European continent, is equally rich in dialect data. Both languages have been extensively documented and studied by dialectologists for over a century. In this talk, I will give examples from the Northern and Southern dialect areas of Greece, from the outlier Cypriot dialect of Cyprus and the equally outlier dialects of central Argentinian Spanish and Northwestern Spain, showing how they can illustrate historical change and illuminate questions of phonological theory and description. Moreover, I will show how generative phonology can in turn illuminate dialect studies, taking apparently unrelated differences between dialects and attributing them to a single change in the phonological grammar.

The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodations in its services, programs, activities, education, and employment for individuals with disabilities.

To request disability accommodations, please contact the Office of the ADA Coordinator in advance.
545-6450 (voice); 543-6452 (TDD); access@u.washington.edu

Talk: “Indian Sign Language” – TODAY, May 31, 3:30PM

lingadv — Fri, 31 May 2013 13:39:13 +0000

A research scholar from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Dr. Jeffrey Davis, is coming to town for a surprise presentation on Indian Sign Language. He has rare video footage he wants to show us demonstrating how American Sign Language vocabulary etymology relates to Plains Indian Sign Language.

The talk will be TODAY, Friday, May 31st from 3:30-4:30PM in Gowen Hall 301. He will stay for questions afterwards until 5:30.

Since this is a very last minute arrangement, we haven’t arranged ASL interpreters. Second year ASL skills are recommended so you can understand the presentation and discussion better. Sorry about the last minute notice. Dr. Davis is thinking of doing a formal presentation next time he stops by town ahead of time. But for now, it will just be a casual presentation.

Remember this event is not interpreted so you need second year ASL skills or above to be able to understand the presentation.

GPSS/Linguistics Colloquium 05/31/13 – Bruce Hayes

lingadv — Tue, 28 May 2013 23:43:36 +0000

Saltation in Phonology
Bruce Hayes
UCLA, Department of Linguistics

Friday, May 31, 2013
3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
MGH 241

Phonological saltation occurs when one sound is converted to another, leaping over a third sound. Thus in Campidanian Sardinian the voiceless stop [p], when it occurs between two vowels, is pronounced as [?] (voiced fricative), leaping over invariant [b], a voiced stop. It appears that saltation is rare and arises only through historical accidents like borrowing or hypercorrection. Saltation has also proven to be hard to learn, as demonstrated in recent experiments by James White using the artificial language learning paradigm.

To explain why saltation is disfavored, I invoke the “P-map” theory of Donca Steriade, which embodies language learners’ phonetically-based expectations about phonological alternation, as well as the maxent-based learning theory of Colin Wilson, which mathematically models how biases such as the P-map influence learning. As I will show, this approach predicts the difficulty of saltation and matches well to White’s experimental data. The overall theme is that classical questions in language learning – notably, how the language faculty interacts with the input data – can now be addressed in concrete mathematical terms.

To request disability accommodations, please contact the Office of the ADA Coordinator in advance.
545-6450 (voice); 543-6452 (TDD); access@u.washington.edu (e-mail).

FUNDED BY:
Graduate & Professional Student Senate
University of Washington