3rd December 2020 04:10 PM

CLC Speaker Series: Morgan Sonderegger, McGill University

The Cornell Linguistics Circle proudly presents Associate Professor Morgan Sonderegger from McGill University, who will talk about  The SPADE project: large-scale analysis of a spoken language across space and time. 

Abstract:

Speech corpora of many languages, styles, and formats exist in the world, representing significant potential for scientific studies of speech -- by language scientists but also for health and technological applications.  However in practice there are significant practical and methodological barriers to conducting the “same study” across corpora.

The Speech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) project (2017-present), a collaboration between universities in Canada, Scotland, and the US, aims to develop and apply user-friendly software for large-scale speech analysis of existing public and private English speech datasets, and to understand how English speech has changed over time and space. This talk summarizes the project's results thus far. 

We briefly introduce our open-source software system for Integrated Speech Corpus ANalysis (ISCAN), then turn to datasets collected for the project and case studies carried out so far analyzing segmental realization (e.g. sibilants, vowels) across Old World (British Isles) and New World (North American) English, which illustrate two possibilities of large-scale studies:

• Shedding light on longstanding questions (such as "which aspects of the sound pattern of a language are learned versus automatic?")

• Enabling completely new directions (such as "are there any sounds that sound the same across all dialects of 'English'?").

4th December 2020 11:30 AM

Jason Baldridge of Google Research (topic TBD)

Jason Baldridge is a research scientist at Google, where he works on natural language understanding. He was previously an Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. His main research interests include categorial grammars, parsing, semi-supervised learning for NLP, reference resolution and text geolocation. He has long been active in the creation and promotion of open source software for natural language processing, including co-creating the Apache OpenNLP Toolkit and OpenCCG. Jason received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 2002, where his doctoral dissertation on Multimodal Combinatory Categorial Grammar was awarded the 2003 Beth Dissertation Prize from the European Association for Logic, Language and Information.

5th December 2020 12:40 PM

Phonetics Lab Meeting

Dr. Eli Marshall will give the second part of his talk on the phonetics/phonology of blues music.  

11th December 2020 09:55 AM

Invited Speaker Stefan Frank: Neural models of bilingual sentence processing

As part of Computational Psycholinguistics Discussion, invited speaker Stefan Frank (Radboud University) will give a talk on Neural models of bilingual sentence processing.

Abstract: A bilingual’s two grammars do not form independent systems but interact with each other, as is clear from phenomena such as syntactic transfer, cross-linguistic structural priming, and code-switching. I will present neural network models of bilingual sentence processing that show how (some of) these phenomena can emerge from mere exposure to two languages, that is, without requiring cognitive mechanisms that are specific to bilingualism.

Bio: Stefan is a computational psycholinguist who has worked on a wide range of topics in sentence processing, studying both native and non-native language users. He is an associate professor of psycholinguistics and data science in the Center for Language Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen.

Contact Cornell's Dr. Marten van Schijndel for the Zoom link.