CI fellow application for 2010 and onward due soon

If you’re thinking about joining HLP lab (or other computational labs) for 2010-2011/12 as a post-doc, consider applying to a CI fellowship. It’s highly competitive, but a super sweet deal. Here is what it says about eligibility and funding:

Eligibility. A CIFellow must have completed (or be prepared to complete) all requirements forgraduation from a U.S. Ph.D. program between May 1, 2009, and August 31, 2010. The Ph.D.must be in computer science, computer engineering, information science, or a closely relatedfield. Preference will be given to U.S. citizens and permanent residents, but others will be considered.

Award Size and Duration. We anticipate that awards will be for $75,000 salary for 12 monthswith approximately $25,000 for fringe benefits and a $15,000 allowance for moving, travel, anddiscretionary expenses. Host organizations will receive indirect costs at the 25% rate. The 12-month assignment must begin by November 1, 2010.

Good luck. (regardless of where you apply

Annotated example analysis using mixed models

Jessica Nelson (Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh) uploaded a step-by-step example analysis using mixed models to her blog. Each step is nicely annotated and Jessica also discusses some common problems she encountered while trying to analyze her data using mixed models. I think this is a nice example for anyone trying to learn to use mixed models. It goes through all/most of the steps outlined in Victor Kuperman and my WOMM tutorial (click on the graph to see it full size):

Coming up: Mini-WoMM in Montreal

If you in the Montreal area, consider joining us for a Workshop on Ordinary and Multilevel Models to be held 5/3-4 at McGill and organized by Michael Wagner, Aparna Nadig, and Kris Onishi. The workshop will include the usual intros to linear regression, linear mixed models, logistic regression, and mixed logit models. We will also discuss common issues and solutions to regression modeling. Additionally, we will have a couple of special area lectures/tutorials:

• Maureen Gillespie (Northeastern) will talk about different ways to code your variables and how that relates to the specific hypotheses you’re testing.
• Peter Graff (MIT) will give a tutorial on logistic regression, specifically to test linguistic theories. In all likelihood, he will also sing. Which relates to the previous post, because he likes to sing about OT.

So, join us! I think there also will be a party =). Below is the full invitation (some details may change).

Rutgers-stimulated thoughts/tools

I just came back from a wonderful visit at Rutgers (RuCCS to be precise). I had a lot of interesting conversations, some of which directly or indirectly brought up some tools that I wanted to mention here.

• So, first I was treated to a great presentation of OT Workplace (by Alan Prince and Bruce Tesar), a cool and relatively intuitive environment that lets you investigate the consequences of a set of proposed OT constraints (this is brave old categorical OT, nuttin’ with stochastics or Harmonic Grammars etc.). There are to many functions to describe them here (including, of course, factorial typologies), but if you’re into Optimality Theory, have a look.  The above link goes straight to the excel sheet with the documentation and scripts (VBA-based). If it’s broken just check on Alan’s page.
• Although this didn’t really come up during conversations, I just saw this nice MatLab package by Randy Gallistel on a Bayesian approach to Proving The Null (hypothesis). Actually you can also enter data for an analysis online (though it might be helpful to first read the page linked in bold above).

So, thanks to Jane and Patty for organizing this visit and to everyone for the good conversations.

Some papers

We’d appreciate feedback on the following papers:

• Ting Qian (BCS, Rochester) just finished a paper on constant entropy profiles across 12 languages.
• Hal Tily (Linguistics, Stanford) and I finished a first draft of an overview of processing and communicative pressure on language comprehension and production with the primary goal to provide a quick intro for researchers interested in how processing and other pressures may shape grammar over time (cf. functionalism).

Let us know what you think and what we should add/change.

NSF graduate fellowship

Congratulations to Alex B. Fine who just was awarded an NSF graduate fellowship. Awesomest!  Now the next dinner is on him (finally .

Fine grained linguistic knowledge, CUNY poster

And here is one more poster from CUNY. This one is work by Robin Melnick at Stanford together with Tom Wasow. Robin ran forced-choice and 100-point-preference norming experiments on that-mentioning in relative and complement clauses to investigate the extent to which the factors that affect processing correlate with the factors affecting acceptability judgments. Going beyond previous work, he actually directly correlates the effect sizes of individual predictors in the processing and acceptability models. All experiments were run both in the lab and over the web using MechanicalTurk.