McLing

This week at the Montreal Computational and Qualitative Linguistics Lab meeting, Timothy O’Donnell will be presenting his Meditations on Compositional Structure, to makeup for last week’s postponement. This presentation attempts to synthesize several threads of work in a broader framework. We meet at 2:30 via zoom (if you are not on the MCQLL emailing list, please contact […]

McLing presents the second edition of VirtualLing, documenting our current virtual lives. Please send your photos and screenshots! PhD student Vanna Willteron sends a photo of her tidied up office space, noting: “I am proud of how cozy and clean I managed to get it so I wanted to share. I do miss my office mates […]

A new paper by James Tanner, Morgan Sonderegger, Jane Stuart-Smith (Glasgow), and Josef Fruehwald (Kentucky), entitled “Toward ‘English’ phonetics: variability in pre-consonantal voicing effect across English dialects and speakers” has just been published in the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: Language and Computation. Congrats all!

Welcome to the first of potentially many screenshot updates on our virtual linguistics lives. Since we don’t currently get to run into each other in the hall of 1085 Peel, please send screenshots of virtual meetings you have––classes, reading groups, small advising meetings––McLing wants them all. Course lecturer Natália Brambatti Guzzo is teaching LING 355 ‘Language […]

The next meeting of the Montreal Computational and Quantitative Linguistics Lab will take place on Wednesday May 13th, at 2:30, via Zoom. Bing’er will present on Modelling Perceptual Effects of Phonology with Automatic Speech Recognition Systems. If you would like to participate but are not on the MCQLL or computational linguistics emailing list, contact emily.goodwin@mail.mcgill.ca for […]

McGill Linguistics graduate students had a successful round of funding applications! Students awarded grants include: Emily Goodwin, supervised by Tim O’Donnell and Siva Reddy of McGill and Dzmitry Bahdanau of ElementAI received a MITACs grant for a 4-month internship this summer. This project explores systematic generalization in neural models for semantic parsing. Jacob Hoover received a […]

The next meeting of the Montreal Computational and Qualitative Linguistics Lab will take place on Wednesday May 6th at 2:30, via Zoom. Jacob Hoover will present an ongoing project on compositionality and predictability. For abstract and more information see the MCQLL lab page. If you would like to participate but are not on the MCQLL […]

The next meeting of the Montreal Computational and Qualitative Linguistics Lab will take place on Wednesday April 29th, at 2:30, via Zoom. Koustuv Sinha will present “Learning an Unreferenced Metric for Online Dialogue Evaluation” (ACL, 2020). For abstract and more information see the MCQLL lab page. If you would like to participate but are not on the MCQLL or computational […]

Congratulations to coauthors Oriana Kilbourn-Ceroun (PhD ’17), Meghan Clayards, and Michael Wagner, who have just had their paper “Predictability modulates pronunciation variants through speech planning effects: A case study on coronal stop realizations” accepted for publication in the journal Laboratory Phonology.

“Structured heterogeneity in Scottish stops over the twentieth century”, a paper by Morgan Sonderegger, Jane Stuart-Smith, Thea Knowles (McGill BA 2012, Asst Prof at U. Buffalo), Rachel Macdonald, and Tamara Rathcke, was published in the March issue Language.  Congrats all! Abstract: How and why speakers differ in the phonetic implementation of phonological contrasts, and the relationship of this ‘structured heterogeneity’ […]

Spandana Gella, research scientist at Amazon AI, will present on “Robust Natural Language Processing with Multi-task Learning” at this week’s Montreal Computational and Quantitative Linguistics Lab meeting. We are meeting Wednesday, April 22nd, at 2:00 via Zoom (to be added to the MCQLL listserve, please contact Jacob Hoover at jacob.hoover@mail.mcgill.ca). Abstract: In recent years, we have seen […]

McLing is happy to report that PhD student Jeff LaMontagne has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University Bloomington, to begin this August. Congratulations Jeff!

McLing is happy to report that Jessica Coon and Stefan Keine’s paper “Feature Gluttony” has been accepted for publication in the journal Linguistic Inquiry. Abstract: This paper develops a new approach to a family of hierarchy effect-inducing configurations, with a focus on Person Case Constraint (PCC) effects, dative-nominative configurations, and copula constructions. The main line of […]

The next meeting of the Montreal Computational and Qualitative Linguistics Lab will take place on Wednesday April 1st, at 1:00, via Zoom. At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Emi Baylor and Nathan Drezner will present their ongoing work investigating German plural system and theories of linguistic productivity. They will present recent findings on how relative word frequency effects models […]

The next meeting of the Montreal Computational and Qualitative Linguistics Lab will take place on Wednesday April 1st, at 1:00, via Zoom (meeting ID: 912 324 021). This week, Guillaume Rabusseau will present on “Spectral Learning of Weighted Automata and Connections with Recurrent Neural Networks and Tensor Networks”. Abstract: Structured objects such as strings, trees, and graphs are ubiquitous in […]

A new paper by Michael Wagner was recently published in the journal Snippets. The full citation and link are: Wagner, Michael (2019). Disjuncts must be mutually excludable. Snippets 37.  http://dx.doi.org/10.7358/snip-2019-037-wagn

Jacob Hoover and Mathieu Paillé traveled to Vancouver last weekend for the 2020 meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), held at UBC. Jacob’s talk was titled “Accounting for variation in number agreement in Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions”, and Mathieu presented “Exhaustivity and the meaning of colour terms”.  

This Tuesday, Francisco will lead a discussion of Baese-Berk et al.‘s (2019) “Not just a function of function words: Distal speech rate influences perception of prosodically weak syllables.” The reading is available at bit.ly/PReadingGroup. P* Reading Group takes place at 1pm on Tuesdays, in Room 117 of the Linguistics Building. All are welcome to attend!

We are pleased to announce that the next talk in our 2019-20 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be by Laura Dilley (Michigan State University) on Friday, March 13 at 3:30 pm in the Education Building room 433. The title of the talk is TBA. We will make an updated announcement shortly with the updated title and abstract. All are welcome to attend.

Morgan Sonderegger and James Tanner traveled to Glasgow to give two talks at the SPADE-PAC-PFC Workshop, held at the University of Glasgow 20-21st February:  Morgan Sonderegger – SPADE Project overview James Tanner, Morgan Sonderegger, Jane Stuart-Smith (Glasgow) – Vowel variation across English dialects