IGERT Student wins AAAS Poster Competition

A student poster presented by Yakov Kronrod (Linguistics), featuring work by Yakov, Chang Hu (CS), Olivia Buzek (CS and Linguistics undergrad), and Alexander J. Quinn (CS), has been named the winning poster in the Math, Technology, and Engineering category at the 2011 American Association for the Advancement of Science, (AAAS) Student Poster Competition. The AAAS is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science.

The poster, entitled Using Monolingual Crowds to Improve Translation, reported on work done in the context of a project on crowdsourcing and translation led by Ben Bederson and Philip Resnik, which is supported by NSF and a Google Research Award. The students will be recognized in a spring issue of Science and on the Annual Meeting web site for AAAS, in addition to receiving a cash prize and a subscription to Science.

Particular recognition goes to Yakov for his leadership in creating and presenting the poster, and to all four students for the excellent work represented here and in the project as a whole. Congratulations on this well deserved recognition!

33rd Second Language Research Forum at UMD

In October, the students from the Second Language Acquisition Program hosted the 33rd Second Language Research Forum, a major annual international conference in the field of SLA. It started with a two-hour presentation by Dr. Colin Phillips, who provided an overview of recent developments in experimental and computational tools for language science, with a focus on special considerations for SLA research. The talk was followed by seven concurrent free tutorial workshops, all filled to capacity:

1. Reaction Time Studies using DMDX (Nan Jiang)
2. E-Prime Workshop for Psycholinguistics in SLA (Annie Tremblay, Sunyoung Lee-Ellis, Anna Lukyanchenko)
3. Eye-Tracking for Language using Eyelink and ASL Remote Eye Trackers (Jared Novick, Susan Teubner-Rhodes, Alan Mishler, Shayne Sloggett)
4. Neurolinguistics using Electroencephalography (EEG) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Colin Phillips, Wing-Yee Chow, Shannon Barrios)
5. New Considerations for Studies of Memory & Language (Brian Dillon, Erika Hussey)
6. Working with Children (Candise Chen, Min Wang)
7. Analysis and Visualization using R (Pedro Alcocer, Ewan Dunbar)

The conference proper started with the opening plenary by Dr. Michael Long (University of Maryland), who presented an embryonic theory of instructed adult SLA. The first day of the conference was celebrated with a free Welcome Reception at Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, where attendees were treated to a choice of light meals and beverages. The second day of the conference saw a full day of colloquia, papers, posters, a workshop on how to get published in SLA, and another plenary talk on the topic of the L2 ultimate attainment given by Dr. Kenneth Hyltenstam (Stockholm University). In the evening, many SLRF attendees used the opportunity to socialize and network at the dinner reception, complete with a student jazz trio [provided by the UMD School of Music]. The remaining two days of the conference were filled with four colloquia, papers, posters, and two more plenary talks by Dr. William O'Grady (University of Hawaii) on language acquisition without an acquisition device, and Dr. Judith Kroll (Pennsylvania State University) on the consequences of bilingualism for cognition.
Overall, we think SLRF 2010 was a big success. The conference provided a venue for 424 faculty members and graduate students to meet, present their work, exchange and develop their research ideas. It featured 4 plenary talks, 6 colloquia, 2 workshops, 109 papers and 39 posters! Several seasoned SLRFers said this was the best SLRF they had ever attended, due mostly to the high quality of the presentations and the well-executed organization. Much of the success of the conference was due to two factors, generous financial support and a dedicated group of hard-working student organizers and volunteers. The faculty members and the Ph.D. students from the SLA Program would like to express their sincere thanks to those students and volunteers who contributed to the organization of the conference as well as to the conference sponsors: the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLC), The College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) Program, and UMD’s Division of Research.

New Language Science Faculty: Hal Daume III, CS & LING

Hal Daume III is a new Assistant Professor in Computer Science, with a joint appointment in Linguistics. He is primarily interested in the interface between natural language processing, computational linguistics and machine learning.
His work in statistical modeling spans multiple aspects of language processing, including structured prediction, Bayesian methods, domain adaptation, and linguistic typology. Recently, he has been particularly interested in methods that involve processing many (100+) languages simultaneously, using linguistic insights (particularly from typology) to constrain the space of solutions that learning algorithms try to explore. He has latent interests in document summarization, discourse theory and language evolution.

HESP to host CLAN Training Workshop

On October 14, Nan Ratner, Chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, will host a workshop on new methods that allow greatly improved efficiency in transcribing and analyzing audio and video data. The workshop will focus on recently developed enhancements to the CLAN tools offered by CHILDES, the Child Language Data Exchange system (see here for more information: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/). CLAN is a program released by CHILDES used in multimedia data organization and analysis.

Space is limited for the October workshop, due to the already high level of interest that it has generated, but you should feel free to contact Nan Ratner at nratner@hesp.umd.edu if you are interested. The workshop will run from 4-6pm on Thursday October 14th in the Hearing & Speech Sciences graduate classroom (Lefrak 0135), and will guide participants through hands-on exercises. As an added bonus, Nan will bring wine and cheese, and additional donations of soda or snacks are welcomed.

Amy Weinberg takes position as deputy executive director at CASL

Amy Weinberg, Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), and the Department of Computer Science, was named as the new deputy executive director of the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL). Dr. Weinberg played a key role in the founding of CASL in 2003 where she served as Area Director for Technical Use from 2004-2007. She returns to CASL with an even greater wealth of experience in Language Science research, including directing efforts for the Language Cognition and Culture Center as part of her appointment in the UMD Vice President for Research's office since 2007, working as PI on the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins from 2007-2010, and serving as co-PI for our own IGERT program on the Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity since 2008. See also: http://www.casl.umd.edu/node/1360.

Sunyoung Lee-Ellis (SLA) awarded $3000 for IGERT poster presentation

At this year’s NSF-IGERT annual meeting (May 24-25, Washington DC) Sunyoung Lee-Ellis (SLA) was awarded $3000 for her poster presentation on "Why bilinguals forget or not forget what their parents told them." The poster was based on joint research studies with Shannon Hoerner (LING) and several language science faculty. The award is meant to support Sunyoung's ongoing research in the US and Korea on the linguistic and perceptual abilities of heritage language speakers.

This year’s IGERT poster competition featured one student representative from each of the roughly 130 currently active IGERT programs, spanning across areas such as ecology, nanoscience, robotics, fuel cell technology, and applied mathematics. In her presentation, Sunyoung highlighted the parts of her research that the general public could relate to and conveyed why her research should be of interest to them.

The IGERT meeting also offered Sunyoung the opportunity present to engineering students the wikis that the UMD-IGERT language science students created to enhance interdisciplinary communication. She also took part in a session on how to present your work in a 60-second 'elevator speech', and learned about emerging opportunities for digital science and science journalism. The exercise was meant to encourage students to engage in sharing research and ideas with scholars of other disciplines.

6 New faculty hires in language sciences!

In addition to the historic snow storms that filled our winter, we also had an unprecedented number of job talks in different areas of language sciences. The outcome of this is that the University of Maryland made at least 6 new faculty hires in language-related areas! Given that this happened in the midst of a hiring freeze, this is another mark of the university’s strong support for language science. Fuller details of these exciting new hires will follow, but here is a quick summary:

Jordan Boyd-Graber will join the iSchool. Jordan’s research focuses on applying statistical models to natural language applications, with both engineering and cognitive focus. His PhD is from Princeton, and he is currently a postdoc at Maryland with Philip Resnik.

Hal Daume will join the Dept of Computer Science. Hal is an emerging leader in the area of multilingual NLP and machine learning. He has a PhD from USC and is currently on the faculty at the U of Utah.

Naomi Feldman will join the Dept of Linguistics. Naomi is an expert in computational psycholinguistics, and is attracting much attention for her work on modeling the learning of sound systems. She is completing her PhD at Brown U, and will be at Maryland starting in Spring ’11, when she will teach an IGERT-related course on computational modeling in language.

Ellen Lau will join the Dept of Linguistics. Ellen is an expert in the cognitive neuroscience of language, combining MEG, fMRI, ERP, and behavioral measures in her work on lexical and sentence comprehension. She received her PhD from Maryland in 2009 and is currently a postdoc at Tufts U and Harvard Medical School, where she is also investigating schizophrenia and dyslexia.

Elizabeth Redcay will be joining the Dept of Psychology. Liz is an expert in social cognitive neuroscience, with a focus on non-verbal communication, early language acquisition, and autism spectrum disorder. She has a PhD from UC San Diego and is currently a postdoc at MIT.

Bob Slevcwill be joining the Dept of Psychology and CASL. Bob’s will bring much-needed expertise in language production to our community, and his interests also include memory, aphasia, second language acquisition, and language/music relations. Bob has a PhD from UC San Diego and is currently a postdoc at Rice University.

IGERT-sponsored Symposium on learning at ISIC, Baltimore in March

Each year our IGERT program organizes an interdisciplinary symposium at a leading conference in an area related to the language sciences. By bringing researchers with different methodological and theoretical perspectives together, the symposium promotes the project’s vision of sustainable interdisciplinary collaboration in language science to a broader audience. This spring Jeff Lidz and Bill Idsardi led a symposium on Statistical Inference in Infant Language Acquisition at the Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies (ISIC) in Baltimore (March 10-14, 2010). Our own Amanda Woodward (Psychology) and Nathan Fox (Human Development) were program chairs for the entire conference. The unusual feature of this symposium is that it brought cross-linguistic and computational expertise together with infancy research to address fundamental issues in language learning.
Symposium line-up:

1. How to Learn Vowels: Computational Approaches to Language Diversity
William Idsardi, Brian Dillon, Ewan Dunbar (University of Maryland)
2. From Sounds to Words: A Bayesian Approach to Modeling Word Segmentation
Sharon Goldwater (University of Edinburgh)
3. Finding Rules and Words in the Speech Stream at Year 1
Luca Bonatti (University of Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
4. Statistical Syntactic Inference in Infancy
Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland)
5 Discussion
Jenny Saffran (University of Wisconsin)

Date for Everybody’s Diary: IGERT External Advisory Board, May 12-13

Please mark in your diaries that the first annual meeting of the external advisory board for our IGERT program in language science will take place on Weds May 12th (evening – students) and Thurs May 13th (all day – everybody). The aim of this meeting is to synthesize what we have done and what we hope to do, and to gain feedback for us and for the university administration on the program. Broad participation from faculty and students in the advisory board visit is important. More details of the schedule for the visit will follow shortly.

The external advisory board consists of 5 distinguished figures from different areas of the language sciences: Susan Gass (Mich State, SLA), Greg Hickok (UC Irvine, Cogn Neurosci), Mitch Marcus (UPenn, Comp Ling), Masha Polinsky (Harvard, theoretical linguistics), and Mabel Rice (Kansas, atypical language development).

Faculty highlight: Alexander Williams

Alexander Williams is a new Assistant Professor in the Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy. His research is mainly in verbal semantics and its relation to clausal syntax. His aim is to develop a theory of semantic composition in natural languages, and correspondingly a theory of semantic values for verbs, and his research has a strong cross-linguistic focus, in particular languages of the isolating type, including a number of different languages of China and Mongolia. Presently, Alexander is developing experiments that probe the semantic expectations of toddlers, in collaboration with Jeffrey Lidz. What relations between what a verb means and where it occurs does the infant acquiring language expect to find, if any? For example, are toddlers who hear a transitive verb X in "he X'ed it flat" predisposed to conclude that the referent of "it" gets "X'ed" (as English requires, but Igbo does not)? Alexander’s current courses include a graduate course in pragmatics, jointly with Valentine Hacquard.