Polinsky wins Digging into Data Challenge Award
Professor Maria Polinsky and Alan Bale of Concordia University were one of the winners of the third Digging into Data Challenge for their project "Cleaning, Organizing, and Uniting Linguistic Databases (COULD)." Digging into Data Challenge is "a competition to develop new insights, tools and skills in innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis." The abstract for the COULD project is below:
Cleaning, Organizing, and Uniting Linguistic Databases (the COULD project)
(Principal Investigators: Maria Polinsky, Harvard University, US; Alan Bale, Concordia University, CAN)
The COULD project has 5 goals. (1) It seeks to transfer existing linguistic data from a variety of different formats into a universal format that will allow linguists to combine and share information, not only with other linguists but also with the public at large. (2) The project will build applications that automatically correct errors, draw attention to inconsistencies, and fill gaps in the data. (3) These automated mechanisms will provide new tools to detect patterns that are not obvious when looking at smaller databases. (4) The project seeks to make the vast amounts of linguistic data, currently only being used by researchers, available to second language learners by developing search algorithms that facilitate lesson creation. (5) The project will make data collection easier and thus make language preservation and documentation less dependent on experts. Communities trying to revive endangered languages will benefit directly from this project.
Congratulations, Masha!
"iLinguaggi" Festival Delle Scienze to be held January 23-26
Jacopo Romoli (Harvard Linguistics PhD 2012, University of Ulster) and Vittorio Bo, Publisher of Edizioni Code, are the organizers of the "iLinguaggi" Festival Delle Scienze 2014 being held in Rome, Italy, from January 23-26.
The language is one of the most extraordinary and distinctive characteristics of the human species.
In the words of the linguist Noam Chomsky, when we study human language, we are approaching what might be called the study of "human nature," the quality of mind that characterize us as a species and that are inseparable from any critical phase of human existence, individual and social development. The scientific study of language from the fifties of the last century has acquired a new and crucial role in the study of the mind, rooted in linguistics, philosophy of language and cognitive science. The science of language raises a number of fascinating and unique questions and explores with the same methodological rigor and the same formal mathematical tools other natural sciences: how we communicate a potentially infinite number of meanings? What are the differences and similarities between different languages? What is the relationship between language and perception of reality, or, if we speak different languages perceive reality in a different way? As you develop the language in the child's mind? And again, what we teach specific pathologies of language? What is the relationship between music and language? What is the role of language in the political and legal? These and other issues that will face the Science Festival in its ninth edition, as always from the perspective of the most advanced research, bringing together the biggest names in Italian and international scientific research, but also philosophers and historians of science, journalists and experts to understand and discuss what science can teach us today about the language.
Please check the program for more information.
Harvard at LSA 2014
The 88th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) took place January 2-5, 2014 in Minneapolis, MN. The following talks featured Harvard presenters:
... Read more about Week of January 20, 2014
