brownbags

The purpose of the group is to discuss issues in large datasets, language, and speech processing.
We are hoping to bring our cross-disciplinary strengths to these areas, to share ideas, to discuss
the current state of the art, and to collaborate on research topics.

Schedule

Upcoming:

Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Location: TBD
Time: TBD

Dr. Alice Freed (Linguistics, MSU)

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Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Cohen Lounge (Dickson Hall), 2PM
(Light refreshments will be served)

Learning to Generate Understandable Animations of American Sign Language

Matt Huenerfauth, Associate Professor, City University of New York (CUNY)

A majority of deaf high school graduates in the U.S. have a fourth-grade English reading level or below, and so computer-generated animations of
American Sign Language (ASL) could make more information and services accessible to these individuals. Instead of presenting English text on
websites or computer software, information could be conveyed in the form of animations of virtual human characters performing ASL
(produced by a computer through automatic translation software or by an ASL-knowledgable human scripting the animation). Unfortunately,
getting the details of such animations accurate enough linguistically so that they are clear and understandable is difficult, and methods are
needed for automating the creation of high-quality ASL animations.

This talk will discuss my lab's research, which is at the intersection of the fields of assistive technology for people with disabilities,
computational linguistics, and the linguistics of ASL. Our methodology includes: experimental evaluation studies with native ASL signers,
motion-capture data collection of an ASL corpus, linguistic analysis of this corpus, statistical modeling techniques, and animation synthesis
technologies. In this way, we investigate new models that underlie the accurate and natural movements of virtual human characters performing ASL;
our current work focuses on modeling how signers use 3D points in space and how this affects the hand-movements required for ASL verb signs.

About the Speaker:

Matt Huenerfauth is an associate professor of computer science and linguistics at the City University of New York (CUNY); his research focuses on the design
of computer technology to benefit people who are deaf or have low levels of written-language literacy. He serves as an associate editor of the ACM Transactions
on Accessible Computing, the major computer science journal in the field of accessibility for people with disabilities. In 2008, he received a five-year Faculty
Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation to support his research. In 2005 and 2007, he received the Best Paper Award
at the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, the major computer science conference on assistive technology for people with disabilities;
he is serving as general chair for this conference in 2012. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006.

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Monday, December 12, 1PM
Special Collections Room @ Sprague Library

On the roles of CODAs in sign language research: Separating L1/L2 acquisition from hearing status

Dr. Marie Nadolske (Linguistics)

This study examines narratives of three groups of American Sign Language (ASL) signers: Deaf native signers (DOD), hearing native signers (CODAs), and
highly proficient non-native hearing signers (L2). Through the examination of several language domains, acquisition patterns can be identified based on whether
ASL was learned as a first or second language. Alternately, differing language patterns were identified based on whether a signer had “normal” hearing or was Deaf.
These findings resulted from the inclusion of the CODA group in this study. Without their valuable data, differences between the hearing L2 signers and Deaf L1
signers would be solely attributable to language acquisition status with no acknowledgement of the potential complications of being a bimodal-bilingual individual.

slides
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Friday, November 11, 2PM
Special Collections Room @ Sprague Library

Perception-Production Relations in Phonological Development
Dr. Tara McAllister Byun (Communication Sciences and Disorders)

Many children who neutralize phonemic contrasts in production exhibit diminished perceptual discrimination of the same contrasts.
It has proven difficult to determine whether these parallel errors reflect the influence of a primary perceptual deficit on production, or vice versa.
I will offer evidence on the direction of causation by comparing positional influences on speech production and perception in one four-year-old
boy with phonological disorder. The case study subject neutralized some phonemic contrasts only in initial position, a context known to have
enhanced perceptual salience to adult listeners. This unique phenomenon in child phonology has been proposed to arise from a child-specific
pattern of perceptual sensitivity favoring final position. However, in a nonword discrimination task, the subject was significantly more accurate
in detecting contrasts in initial position, where his production errors occurred. In light of this mismatch, I conclude that the subject's errors must
be the consequence of a production-oriented factor. Independent of position, however, the subject's perception of a phonemic contrast he neutralized in
production was decreased relative to other contrasts. I thus argue that this case represents an unambiguous example of a perceptual deficit arising from a
primary deficit in the production domain.

slides

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Friday, October 14, 2011 2PM
Special Collections Room @ Sprague Library

Dr. Laura Lakusta (Psychology, MSU)

Language and memory for motion events: The asymmetry between source and goal paths over development.

Human beings talk about events. The capacity to do so requires an interface between spatial cognition and language.
However, given that the format of linguistic and non-linguistic representations is likely to differ, the question arises
of how these two systems map onto each other and how these mappings are learned. I will present research suggesting
one possible solution to this problem: a homology exists between the non-linguistic and linguistic representations of Source
and Goal paths. First, when linguistically describing a broad range of events, children and adults are more likely to encode the
Goal path rather than the Source path. A Goal bias is also found when individuals represent events non-linguistically, and
even extends to the event representations of pre-linguistic infants. Thus, an asymmetry between Goal and Source paths
is common to both linguistic and non-linguistic structure and is found early in development. In the second part of my talk,
I will present research exploring the strength of this homology. Is a Goal bias rooted generally in cognition or is specific
to intentional events? Research with infants, children, and adults suggest the latter – a Goal bias in non-linguistic cognition
shows up most strongly for intentional events. These findings raise the important question of how children learn to collapse
over conceptual domains for purposes of expressing Paths in language.

Slides

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Thursday, October 6, 2011 1PM
Special Collections Room @ Sprague Library

Analysis of Temporal Processing During Sentence Comprehension
Dr. Mary Call (Linguistics) and Dr. David Townsend (Psychology)

For several years, we have been studying the comprehension of temporal relationships in English by native speakers of English.
We are now extending this research to include the processing of temporal relationships by English language learners.
In a pilot study, we collected self-paced reading data from native speakers of Spanish that differs in interesting ways from
similar data collected from native speakers of English. One of our current projects is to carry out a larger scale study of this phenomenon.

In addition, we are testing the influence of the first language (Spanish, in this case) on the judgments that learners make about English
sentences containing stative verbs that occur in a context-establishing when clause. If these learners are relying on their Spanish (L1) strategies,
we predict that they will choose verb forms that are either ungrammatical or less-preferred in English.

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Where: Special Collections Room, Sprague Library
When: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 2PM

“Coordinating two minds: Do familiar partners such as friends and couples have a communicative advantage compared to strangers?”

Meredyth Krych Appelbaum, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology

While one might think that language understanding is a relatively straightforward, passive process,
in reality people must actively work together to establish the mutual belief that they have been
understood (Clark, 1996, Clark & Krych, 2004; Clark &Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986.) Much of the research
in referential communication involves strangers, because it is easier to study the establishment of their
common ground, as opposed to friends or couples who might already share a great deal of information to
which the experimenter is not privy. And yet, much of everyday communication occurs between people who
are familiar with their conversational partners. I will provide evidence that language coordination is
much more complicated that it would at first seem (Clark & Krych, 2004). Further, I will discuss a recent
study that examines the impact of partner familiarity (strangers, friends, vs. couples) on the efficiency
of communication for referential communication tasks in which partners have no privately shared common ground.
There is mixed evidence in the literature as to whether familiar partners can communicate more effectively
than strangers. Based on previous research (Krych-Appelbaum, et al., 2007), we expected and subsequently
found that familiar partners did do no better than strangers. One possible reason is that familiar partners may
wrongly assume that their partners should understand them better than they actually do.

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Where: Special Collections Room, Sprague Library
When: Friday, March 25, 1PM
Speaker: Paul C. Amrhein (Psychology)

How Speech Act Theory Informs Psychotherapy Outcomes or Linguistic Pragmatics Meets Psychiatric Medicine

The narrative genre constructed during a psychotherapeutic session is rife with speech acts, most notably, requests and commitments,
mutually exchanged by clinician and client. However, a theory capturing this phenomenon had not been put to empirical test until
Amrhein, Miller, Yahne, Palmer and Fulcher (2003). Drawing from Austin, Searle, and McCawley, this theory (Amrhein, 2004)
posits that much of the work incurred during psychotherapy concerns the clinician evocation of client utterances denoting desires,
abilities, needs and reasons leading to expressions of commitment to maintain current behavior patterns with deleterious health
consequences or, ideally, to change them. More specifically, it is what Searle calls the “illocutionary force strength” of client verbal
commitments that is proposed to be especially prognostic of future behavior. My talk will present this theory and evidence to
date indicating that commitment strength is a malleable, psychological construct influenced by treatment modality, therapist skill,
and client intellectual characteristics.

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Where: Special Collections Room, Sprague Library
When: Friday, February 25, 1 PM
Speaker: Mary Boyle (Communication Sciences and Disorders)

Semantic Feature Analysis Treatment for Aphasic Word Retrieval Problems:
The Challenge of Moving from Naming to Discourse Production

Evidence from single-subject designs suggest that Semantic Feature Analysis Treatment improves confrontation naming of treated items and
untreated items for people with mild or moderate aphasia. However, generalization of this improvement to word retrieval during discourse
production has been mixed. Providing treatment at the discourse level, rather than at the confrontation naming level, has yielded some
promising results, but has generated a new set of questions, including the best way to measure word retrieval in discourse, the stability of
such measurements from day to day, and the relationships of these measures to listeners' perception of a person's word retrieval ability.
This talk will review research results and discuss current projects at the single-word and discourse levels of treatment.

Slides

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Time: Friday, December 3, 1PM
Location: Cohen Lounge (Dickson Hall)
Speaker: Jing Peng (Computer Science)

Transfer Learning with Applications to Text Classification

When labeled examples are difficult to obtain in a target domain, transfer learning can be very useful that exploits knowledge
obtained from a source domain to improve performance in the target domain. Existing techniques require that sampling distributions
between the two domains are the same. However, this requirement is often violated in practice. In this talk, we describe a technique
that maps both target and source domain data into a space where we can bound the difference between two induced distributions,
thereby dramatically improving performance. We provide experiments that demonstrate the superiority of the proposed technique.

Slides

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Where: Special Collections Room, Sprague Library
When: Wednesday, October 27, 1 PM
Speaker: Jen Pardo (Psychology)

Dominance and Accommodation During Conversational Interaction

Phonetic variation is a problem for psycholinguistic theories of speech production and perception.
If the goal of communication is parity between sender and receiver, then the demands of efficient
communication should lead to matching in the phonetic forms employed by interacting talkers.
However, phonetic variation is neither random nor due solely to physiology, and is the rule rather
than the exception in communication. Therefore, there must be other communicative goals that
influence the phonetic forms talkers use when speaking. The current project aims to delineate
some of the individual, social, and situational factors that influence phonetic form variation in
ordinary conversational interactions. In three studies, unacquainted talkers were recorded before,
during, and after performing a conversational task together. The recordings were analyzed and
excerpts were presented to naive listeners who made perceptual similarity judgments that assessed
the degree to which the talkers converged in phonetic form. Overall, there was a reliable tendency
for the talkers to become more similar phonetically, but this tendency was subtle and was influenced
by sex of the talker and the role of the talker in the interaction. Moreover, the patterns derived from
the global assessments of phonetic similarity provided by the listeners were not related to analyses
of individual acoustic attributes in a straightforward manner. These patterns of phonetic variation
have important implications for an understanding of the processes of speech production, perception,
and their connection.

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Where: Special Collections Room, Sprague Library
When: Friday, September 24, 1-2:30 PM
Speaker: Eileen Fitzpatrick (Linguistics)
Linguistic Cues to Deception