Natural language research announcements

["Girju, Corina R" <girju AT illinois.edu>]

Hi everyone,

Simon Todd, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University, will be giving a job talk for the assistant professor position in Computational Linguistics / Speech Processing at 4pm in FLB G48 next Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2019.

His bio, the title and abstract of the talk are below.

Please distribute and attend!

Best,

Roxana

 

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Title: The Listener in Language Change: A Computational Approach

 

Abstract:

Each individual constantly changes the way they use language, creating and reflecting larger-scale language change. These changes can be motivated by internal, cognitive factors, or by external, social factors. Existing theories of language change target one or the other motivation, but not both. In this talk, I argue that both cognitive and social motivations can be unified under a theory of language change in which perceptual biases in the listener are central.

 

I integrate experimentally-supported perceptual biases in computational modeling and corpus analysis of two case studies, one cognitive and one social. In the cognitive case, I build an empirically-grounded computational model to simulate word-frequency effects in sound change. I show that different word-frequency effects in different kinds of sound change follow from a single perceptual bias, whereby high-frequency words are recognized more easily than low-frequency words when acoustically ambiguous. In the social case, I apply novel data-scientific methods to a large corpus to show that the tag eh has spread across ethnic groups in New Zealand. I then use qualitative methods to show that this spread was facilitated by destigmatization of indigenous Māori, in accordance with a perceptual bias that reduces the memorability of words spoken in stigmatized accents. Taken together, these two case studies highlight how passive but powerful perceptual biases in the listener can shape language change, whether it be motivated cognitively or socially.

 

Bio:

Simon Todd is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University and a member of the Spoken Syntax Laboratory at the Center for the Study of Language and Information. Before coming to Stanford, he studied Mathematics and Linguistics toward a BA(Hons) from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and worked as a Research Assistant at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour. His research aims to identify the biases and constraints underlying spoken language perception and to understand their implications for the way that language is used and for the way that language use changes over time. He uses a three-pronged approach to this goal, combining computational modeling, psycholinguistic experiments, and large-scale corpus analysis. His dissertation research concerns the connection between asymmetries in spoken word perception and asymmetries in rates of sound change in words of different frequencies. It combines a corpus-based case-study in New Zealand English with psycholinguistic experimentation and computational modeling. He is advised by Dan Jurafsky (principal co-advisor; Stanford), Meghan Sumner (principal co-advisor; Stanford), and Jen Hay (reader; University of Canterbury, New Zealand).

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Roxana Girju

Associate Professor of Linguistics,

     Computer Science and Beckman Institute (affiliate/part-time)

Director of Computer Science + Linguistics Joint Major (Linguistics)

University of Illinois