While I’m on blogging hiatus, here’s some research

You might have noticed that I’m on a bit of hiatus this month. I’m working on my dissertation and preparing applications for post-grad-school jobs, but luckily something I’d done a little while ago has come through the pipeline for me to share.

Back in June, I presented a portion of my dissertation research at the NAACL-HLT conference, but all I had at the time was a computationally-dense paper to show you.  Well, the conference has uploaded videos of all the presentations, so if you’re interested in what I actually do academically, you can find out.  In short, this portion of my research is about the improvements in word segmentation that happen when you combine multiple types of information instead of using a single type.  It’s a computational model of how infants could use additional information to learn words better, as well as learning the likely stress patterns for words in the language they’re learning.

The video [20 min, plus questions that are unfortunately hard to hear]

I tried to make the talk approachable to the non-specialist, so take a gander if you want to see some of my dissertation research (which, of course, is pretty far afield from the discussions on this blog).  There will be math, too, in case you are a specialist, and if you want the whole story, you can see the paper that accompanies the talk.

In other news, I’ll be giving a talk on some of my new research showing how Twitter can be used to map the range of dialectal syntactic variants (e.g., double modals like might could and the needs done construction) at the LSA annual meeting in Minneapolis on January 3.  Check out the abstract here, and maybe I’ll see you there!

My research at NAACL 2013

You may have noticed that I’ve been being quite bad about updating the blog the last couple months. I’m sorry for my negligence, and I’m hoping summer will leave me with a bit more time to keep up the blog. But the reason I’ve been remiss is that it’s time to really batten down the dissertation hatches, and boy, that doesn’t leave the time or energy for much else.

Tomorrow morning, the battening of said hatches pays off a little bit, because I’ll be presenting a portion of my dissertation research at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL)’s conference. I don’t imagine too many of you are attending the conference, but if you are, I’ll be presenting in Session C tomorrow (i.e., Monday) morning at 11:55, so swing on by.

If you’re not down here in balmy Atlanta, you can always read the paper in the comfort of wherever you are. It looks at how an infant learning a language can combine syllable identities and stress patterns to segment words within the language they’re learning. I’ll warn you, it’s a lot less accessible than the stuff I write here, but it’s the actual computational psycholinguistic research that I earn my keep with, so I hope you’ll give it a look if you’re interested in such things.