Ally Kraus writes:
Hi everyone!
Join us Tuesday 4/16 at noon for our next meeting, where Mike and Ricardo will be doing practice talks for SRCD (Mike’s abstract below, Ricardo’s pending). We’ll be meeting in Jordan 419 at noon and lunch will be served. I’ll be ordering from Ike’s. Send me:
- sandwich name
- half or whole
- type of bread
- what toppings you’d like
- any special requests/adjustments.
menu: http://ilikeikesplace.com/stanford/
Please send me your requests by Saturday at 10AM so I can place the order.
See you next week!
Developmental and postural changes in children’s visual access to faces
The faces of other people are a critical information source for young children. During early development, children undergo significant postural and locomotor development, changing from lying and sitting infants to toddlers who walk independently. We used a head-mounted camera in conjunction with a face-detection system to explore the effects of these changes on children’s visual access to their caregivers’ faces during an in-lab play session. In a cross-sectional sample of 4–20 month old children, we found substantial changes in face accessibility based on age and posture. These changes may translate into changes in the accessibility of social information during language learning.
Alexis Burgess will be giving a talk on Monday as part of the SymSys Forum. Come to the Greenberg room from 12:15-1:05 to hear about “Identity Explained Away”.
Why do we have the concept of numerical identity? Is it just a spandrel, or do we actually use it for something important? Presumably we don’t have any urgent need to track the distribution of the identity relation out there in the world. A Fregean might say the concept’s raison d’etre is just to prompt the consolidation of mental files. A Quinean might say that it helps us acquire manifestly valuable arithmetical concepts. I have another idea.
CSLI is hosting a workshop, Perspectives on Modality, this Friday, April 12th, organized by Annie Zaenen and Cleo Condoravdi of CSLI and Valeria de Paiva of Nuance. The program can be found here, and a description of the workshop is below:
The study of modality lies at the intersection of reasoning and natural language. In linguistic theory and in logic modality has received intensive study. In NLP it has recently become relevant, as the field is moving beyond the identification of events and their participants towards making inferences about the (likelihood of) occurrence or non-occurrence of events. This workshop assembles linguists, logicians and computer scientists to assess standard and non-standard models of the meaning and inferential properties of modal expressions and to discuss the potential compatibility of seemingly disparate formal frameworks and the way their results can be integrated in NLP.
Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop’s “The Construction of Meaning” is hosting the 14th SemFest this Monday, March 18 in Margaret Jacks Hall, Rm 126. The festivities begin at 1pm and will continue until 5:30, and include many of our faculty and students. Come on out to learn and support them! Find all the abstracts and schedules here.
Ok, you’re wrapping up that QP, now what? Talk about it, of course!
Announcing QP Fest 2013, Friday, April 19th
QP Fest is our annual department-internal mini-conference, a chance to present your work just among friends. QP1, QP2, come one, come all! The exact length of each talk depends on how many speakers they end up with, but they’ll try to make it comfortable, with time for helpful Q&A.
And if you’re “still wrapping”, no problem, it’s 5 weeks away.
So consider this your first “Call for Papers”. Please reply by April 1st (no joke!). All they need is a tentative title to hold your spot.
The Committee:
Robin Melnick
Dasha Popova
Natalia Silveira
John Rickford (chair)