Week of April 11

Language Universals Workshop 

Yoon Kim (MIT)

Title: "Corpus-driven discovery of linguistic structures with neural networks"

Abstract: : Natural language has inherent structure. Words compose with one another to form hierarchical structures to convey meaning. While these compositional structures (such as parse trees) are crucial for mediating human language understanding, they are unobserved during human language acquisition. Yet, human learners have little trouble acquiring the syntax of their native language without explicit supervision. This has motivated the classic task of grammar induction, (i.e., data-driven discovery of syntactic structure from raw text), which has proven to be empirically difficult for artificial language learners. In this talk, I show how recent advances in model parameterization and inference can lead to improved computational tools for discovering syntactic structure from raw text. I also show how such techniques can be applied to induce bilingual synchronous grammars for tasks such as machine translation.

Friday, April 15 | 12:00-1:30 pm | Sever Hall 214 and on Zoom (see your email for link)

 

Concentrator Spotlight: Ben Elwy

 

Ben Elwy (’23: Joint Linguistics / Classics; Archaeology secondary) serves as a Contributing Opinion Writer for The Harvard Crimson. In his column he thoughtfully, frankly, and wittily provides his perspectives on his column’s namesake Living a Disabled Life as it relates to topics like ableism and disability justice.  He has also talked about his other passions like upcoming Nintendo releases and the Kirby franchise.  Ben's latest column, a review of the new Kirby game,  was published on April 5. "Living a Disabled Life" is published bimonthly on alternating Tuesdays.  I would like to share a particularly moving excerpt from “Born a Stranger:”

I’m an expert at working sideways. You need to be, when you’ve spent six months immobilized on your side swinging a Wii Remote.

Let me back up — I’m disabled. I’m a “Percy Jackson” addict, a language nerd, and a believer in vanilla ice cream, and I’m also disabled. Disability is not a monolith. The definition spans everything from depression to dyslexia, and no two people experience disability the same way, even if they have identical conditions.

...

Yet equally, on reflection, it has given me a twofold perspective on life. It’s the perspective of someone who moves but cannot walk; looks but cannot see; talks but cannot be understood. It’s the story of someone born a stranger struggling to belong, at Harvard and in the wider world.

By every aspect of its marginalizing design, disabled people aren’t meant to exist in this world. Yet throughout this column, as I explore what makes me feel like I don’t belong in this world and what reassures me that I truly exist, I’m not asking for pity. In fact, I can hardly think of anything I want less (except rewatching the “Percy Jackson” movies, they’re awful). Instead, as I untangle my experiences of living a disabled life, I hope for discussion, for awareness of how our actions can impact the disabled people invisibly forced to the edges of our communities — and I hope that no matter how crowded of a room as Harvard is, my writing can speak louder than my weak voice, announcing, “We’re here.”