HLP lab
Two post-doc positions available in our lab
- Project 1: Inference and learning during speech perception and adaptation
- Project 2: Web-based self-administered speech therapy
Although we mention preferred specializations below, applicants from any fields in the cognitive and language sciences are welcome. While candidates will join an active project, candidates are welcome/encouraged to also develop their own independent research program. In case of doubt, please contact Florian Jaeger at fjaeger@bcs.rochester.edu, rather than to self-select not to apply.
What did you read in 2015?
Another year has passed and academic platform bombard us with end-of-year summaries. So, here are the most-read HLP Lab papers of 2015. Congratulations to Dave Kleinschmidt, who according to ResearchGate leads the 2015 HLP Lab pack with his beautiful paper on the ideal adapter framework for speech perception, adaptation, and generalization. The paper was cited 22 times in the first 6 months of being published! Well deserved, I think … as a completely neutral (and non-ideal) observer ;).
Academia.edu mostly agreed, Read the rest of this entry »
HLP Lab is grinking 2014
And it’s that time of the year again. Time to take stock. This last year has seen an unusual amount of coming and going. It’s been great to have so many interesting folks visit or spend time in the lab.
Grads
- Masha Fedzechkina defended her thesis, investigation what artificial language learning can tell us about the source of (some) language universals. She started her post-doc at UPenn, where she’s working with John Trueswell and Leila Gleitman. See this earlier post.
- Ting Qian successfully defended his thesis on learning in a (subjectively) non-stationary world (primarily advised by Dick Aslin and including some work joint with me). His thesis contained such delicious and ingenious contraptions as the Hibachi Grill Process, a generalization of the Chinese Restaurant Process, based on the insight that the order of stimuli often contains information about the structure of the world so that a rational observer should take this information into account (unlike basically all standard Bayesian models of learning). Check out his site for links to papers under review. Ting’s off to start his post-doc with Joe Austerweil at Brown University.
Post-docs Read the rest of this entry »
Congratulations to Dr. Fedzechkina
Congratulations to Masha (a.k.a Dr. Fedzechkina) for successfully defending her thesis “Communicative Efficiency, Language Learning, and Language Universals“, jointly advised by Lissa Newport (now at Georgetown) and me. Masha’s thesis presents 7 multi-day artificial language learning studies that investigate the extent to which functional pressures guide language learning, thereby leading learners to subtly deviate from the input they receive.
Five of the experiments investigate the trade-off between word order and case-marking as a means of encoding grammatical function assignment. For a preview on these experiments, see the short report in Fedzechkina, Jaeger, and Newport (2011) and this paper under review. Two additional experiments investigate how learners trade-off animacy and case-marking (Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport, 2012). Her most recent studies also show how learners trade-off uncertainty (assessed as the conditional entropy over grammatical function assignments given perfect knowledge of the grammar) and effort.
Follow HLP lab on the English Zwitscher
Only a few years (decades?) late, HLP lab is now zwitschering insanely uninteresting things on Twitter. You can follow us and get updates about workshops, classes, papers, code, etc. And you can zwitscher back at us and we can all be merry and follow and comment on each other until our eyes pop out or ears explode. In this spirit: @_hlplab_
Post-doctoral position available (speech perception, language comprehension, implicit distributional learning, inference under uncertainty, hierarchical predictive systems)
The Human Language Processing (HLP) Lab at the University of Rochester is looking for a post-doctoral researcher interested in speech perception and adaptation. Possible start dates for this 1-3 year position range from mid August 2014 to mid June 2015 (the current post-doctoral researcher funded under this grant will leave HLP lab in late August to start a tenure-track position in Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh). International students are welcome to apply (NIH research grants are not limited to nationals).
We will start reviewing applications mid-June 2014 though later submissions are welcome. Applications should contain (1) a cover letter clearly indicated possible start dates, (2) a CV, (3) research statement detailing qualifications and research interests, and (4) 2 or more letters of recommendation. Applications and letters should be emailed to Kathy Corser (kcorser@bcs.rochester.edu), subject line “application for post-doc position (HLP Lab)”.
This is an NIH funded project (NIHCD R01 HD075797), currently scheduled to end in 2018. The project is a collaboration between Florian Jaeger (PI), Mike Tanenhaus (co-PI), Robbie Jacobs and Dick Aslin. We are interested in Read the rest of this entry »
A good start to Klinton Bicknell at Northwestern
A belated congratulations and a good start to Klinton Bicknell, who just started his tenure-track position in Linguistics at Northwestern. To quote his website, his research:
… seeks to understand the remarkable efficiency of language comprehension, using the tools of probability theory and statistical decision theory as explanatory frameworks. My work suggests that we achieve communicative efficiency by utilizing rich, structured probabilistic information about language: leveraging linguistic redundancy to fill in details absent from the perceptual signal, to spend less time processing more frequent material, and to make predictions about language material not yet encountered.
Your thoughts on second, third, etc. language learning
After a recent discussion in the lab, I’m curious to hear your speculative or informed opinions about the factors that determine someone’s proficiency in a second (or third, …) language. I’ve put together a brief survey (5-10 minutes) and if you have some time, it’d be great to hear your thoughts. Experts’ and non-experts’ opinions are equally welcome. I will post the results of the survey here.
Thank you for your participation.
And a belated welcome to Scott Grimm
Scott Grimm just joined our faculty in Linguistics at Rochester last month. So today he got his belated Rochester welcome:
Scott joins the Center of Language Sciences at Rochester with an unnecessary number of degrees. Read the rest of this entry »
“Gradience in Grammar” workshop at CSLI, Stanford (#gradience2014)
A few days ago, I presented at the Gradience in Grammar workshop organized by Joan Bresnan, Dan Lassiter , and Annie Zaenen at Stanford’s CSLI (1/17-18). The discussion and audience reactions (incl. lack of reaction in some parts of the audience) prompted a few thoughts/questions about Gradience, Grammar, and to what extent the meaning of generative has survived in the modern day generative grammar. I decided to break this up into two posts. This summarizes the workshop – thanks to Annie, Dan, and Joan for putting this together!
The stated goal of the workshop was (quoting from the website):
For most linguists it is now clear that most, if not all, grammaticality judgments are graded. This insight is leading to a renewed interest in implicit knowledge of “soft” grammatical constraints and generalizations from statistical learning and in probabilistic or variable models of grammar, such as probabilistic or exemplar-based grammars. This workshop aims to stimulate discussion of the empirical techniques and linguistic models that gradience in grammar calls for, by bringing internationally known speakers representing various perspectives on the cognitive science of grammar from linguistics, psychology, and computation.
Apologies in advance for butchering the presenters’ points with my highly subjective summary; feel free to comment. Two of the talks demonstrated
HLP Lab is looking for graduate researchers
The Human Language Processing (HLP/Jaeger) Lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester is looking for PhD researchers to join the lab. Admission is through the PhD program in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences, which offers full five-year scholarship. International applications are welcome.
Come join LIN/BCS/CS/CLS at Rochester: jobs in ‘Big Data’
The University of Rochester has recently announced a Big Data initiative. As part of this initiative, there will be a large number of faculty openings over the next few years, including potential hires in computational linguistics, computational neuroscience, computational psycholinguistics, etc. The first tenure-track positions are now posted. Have a look at this list of departments and areas in which we are searching. Please spread the word.
Let me know if you have questions about these searches. If you’re a language researcher, make sure to check out the list of language faculty at Rochester (the beautiful mixture of hospital and vomit colors is about to be replaced by something more post 20th-century).
HLP lab is grinking 2013
Time for another update on the growing/shrinking HLP Lab. With great sadness we think of those days when the Degenkind and Mr. Fine roamed freely in The Halls of Meliora.
- Alex Fine has left us to more fully embrace his inner Midwest. He accepted a post-doc on an NIH training grant in Psychology, Illinois with Sarah Brown-Schmidt, Duane Watson, and Gary Dell.
- Judith Degen now enjoys Californian bliss on a post-doctoral fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She’ll be working with Noah Goodman and bring even more experimental pragmatic awesomeness to Stanford.
This loss is ameliorated by a few new additions to HLP Lab. We’re excited to welcome Scott and Job this year (and hope that Geertje will just shown up one day and demand her bike back):
- Scott Fraundorf is joining HLP Lab as a post-doctoral researcher to work on implicit learning during syntactic processing and the acquisition of new syntactic structures in native speaker adults. His projects also include studies on how dialect background affects syntactic processing.
- Job Schepens won a Fulbright fellowship to visit HLP Lab in the Spring of 2014. His project “Learning Additional Phonemes: A Phonological Account of L2 Learnability” will be focusing on bi-/multilingualism and how structural similarities across languages (and differences in their complexity) affect ease of acquisition.
Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd to join BCS at Rochester
It’s great to be able to announce that the Center of Language Sciences at the University of Rochester is about to grow. Two new faculty, Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd, will join our Brain and Cognitive Science department, starting in the Summer of 2014. Chances are you know both of them, but here’s a short intro.
Celeste’s research focuses on decision making, attention, and language development in infants and children. Her recent work includes research on the trade-off between too much and too little information/surprisal in learning and how infants seem to be striving for a middle ground (the ‘Goldilocks effect’). She also recently revisited the well-known marshmallow study, putting an intriguing new twist on it: her study suggests that kids can prioritize long-term over short-term rewards, if they have evidence that the long-term rewards will reliably be delivered (see the paper).
Steven’s research focuses on probabilistic inference to learn and process language. His thesis investigated probabilistic models of semantic acquisition — how complex thoughts are acquired through composition out of simpler thought elements (thesis). He has also authored several beautiful papers on how communicative pressures (formalized in terms of information theory and probabilistic inference) are cross-linguistically reflected in the phonological structure of the mental lexicon. Another line of his research focuses on recursion – see, for example, his recent work on recursion in Piraha (talk).
Together they won the 2010 Computational Modeling Prize (Perception/Action) of the Cognitive Science Society.
HLP lab will be at the LSA 2013 summer institute
Come join us in Ann Arbor, MI for the 2013 Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America. You can follow the institute on facebook.
Victor Ferreira and I will be organizing a workshop on How the brain accommodates variability in linguistic representations (more on that soonish). I will be teaching a class on regression and mixed models and I am sure a bunch of other folks from the lab will be there, too.
HLP/Jaeger lab blog 