The New Sesquipedalian

The SymSys Forum presents M.S. Project Presentations by Jonathan Tyler Boyd-Meredith and Miriam Connor. Join them on Monday, 5/13 in the Greenberg Room from 12:15-1:05 to hear the following talks:

Detecting Long-Term, Autobiographical Memories Using fMRI (Jonathan Tyler Boyd-Meredith, advised by Anthony Wagner, Psychology)
Machine learning techniques are being applied increasingly to the field of neuroscience to interpret and make use of the data sets generated by fMRI experiments. This has led to striking results for both basic and applied research in many subfields of neuroscience, including learning and memory. In particular, there has been preliminary success in classifying previously encountered and novel stimuli as either remembered by a subject, or perceived as novel by a subject. However, these experiments have frequently been limited to memory for stimuli encountered in the lab shortly before the memory test. This study uses images collected at three time intervals (6 months, 3 months, and 2 weeks) using a wearable camera that regularly takes still photographs to investigate the performance of similar classifiers on memories for events that happen outside the lab, at multiple time intervals before the memory test.

Unsupervised Disambiguation of Preposition Senses with an LDA Topic Model (Miriam Connor, advised by Beth Levin, Linguistics)
Though it has received relatively little attention in the sense disambiguation literature, preposition sense disambiguation (PSD) represents a challenging task with important applications in machine translation and relation extraction. Most work on PSD has involved on supervised systems, but only a small amount of reliable annotated data is available for preposition sense. I present an unsupervised model for PSD, which performs sense discrimination using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model and discovers semantic relations among the prepositions with group average agglomerative clustering. I compare my system’s performance with previous work on both supervised and unsupervised PSD models and suggest future directions and applications for PSD.

We extend our heartiest congratulations (and think you should too) to the following people:

• Matt Adams, who received a DAAD — Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst – research fellowship. He’ll be conducting research next year at the University of Düsseldorf, working with Ingo Plag
• Alum John Beavers received a teaching award, and has also been promoted to associate professor. Read more here!
• Alum Lauren Hall-Lew also received a teaching honor, an award from the Edinburgh University Students Association.

Today, at the same P-time (12:15) and the same P-place (Greenberg Room), Stephanie Shih will be giving a talk on function word prosodification. Come on out, ‘n’ you might learn a’thing ‘r two.

Function versus content word prosodification: evidence from phonetic reducibility
(Davis Grammatical Word Workshop practice talk)
The division between lexical content words and grammatical function words has been motivated in part by differences in stress and prosody. The traditional view maintains that content words have lexically-programmed stress whereas monosyllabic function words are lexically unstressed and appear on the surface in both strong (unreduced) or weak (reduced) forms. Despite this commonly categorical divide, natural language corpus studies based on intonational prominence have suggested that function words themselves are not a homogeneous class when it comes to their prosodification (e.g., Altenberg 1987; Hirschberg 1993; Bell et al. 2003). In this talk, I follow this latter view: with evidence from phonetic reduction in a corpus of conversational American English, I show that the extent to which function words appear in strong and weak forms varies by subclasses, with some function words behaving like lexically-stressed content words and others exhibiting more variable prosodic realizations. I focus specifically on the prosodification of a function word as weak or strong as conditioned by the neighboring context of weak and strong syllables. Crucially, content words and function word subclasses will differ in their sensitivity to rhythmic environment.

Come to the Greenberg Room this afternoon from 2-5pm for talks by grad students Hsin-Chang Chen, James Collins, Judy Kroo, Dasha Popova, and Tania Rojas-Esponda. Special bonus: Social to follow hosted by the QP Fest Committee – so our first-years can just relax and enjoy the talks! Visit this link for agenda and abstracts (updated as more become available).

We extend our heartiest Sesquikudos to:

• Dan Lassiter will be joining our faculty as an Assistant Professor beginning September
• Cleo Condoravdi will also be joining our faculty as a Professor (Research), beginning September
• Kate Geenberg, who has been awarded this year’s graduate student essay prize by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology