October 2016 - BULA - ling.bu.edu lists

SOME FREE PASSES FOR ARRIVAL MOVIE at Linguistics Open House TODAY, 4.45-6pm LSE 103
by Neil Myler 26 Oct '16

26 Oct '16

Hi everyone, Just a reminder about our Open House this afternoon, where as well as free food there will also be a bit of promotion for the new film, ARRIVAL, to include some free screening passes! [image: Inline image 1] Image credit: Prof. Paul Hagstrom "Synopsis: When mysterious spacecraft touch down across the globe, an elite team - led by expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) - are brought together to investigate. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers – and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity." ARRIVAL Official Channels: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArrivalMovie/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/arrivalmovie Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arrivalmovie/ #WhyAreTheyHere ---- Dear all, Please come to, and spread the word about, the Linguistics Program's Open House this coming Wednesday. It will take place from 4.45-6pm in LSE Room 103. [image: Inline image 1] This is a chance to meet current students and faculty and hear about the program's offerings. And there'll be free food! === If you no longer wish to receive emails from this list, follow this link: http://ling.bu.edu/mailman/listinfo/bula <http://ling.bu.edu/mailman/listinfo/bula> Sign up as a BULA member on orgsync: https://orgsync.com/105066/chapter BULA Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BULingAssoc/?fref=ts <https://www.facebook.com/> Linguistics Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BULinguistics/ Linguistics website: http://ling.bu.edu

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Linguistics Open House, This Weds, 4.45-6pm LSE 103
by Neil Myler 23 Oct '16

23 Oct '16

Dear all, Please come to, and spread the word about, the Linguistics Program's Open House this coming Wednesday. It will take place from 4.45-6pm in LSE Room 103. [image: Inline image 1] This is a chance to meet current students and faculty and hear about the program's offerings. And there'll be free food!

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FYI...
by Jeremy Freudberg 11 Oct '16

11 Oct '16

For fans of Computational Linguistics / Natural Language Processing: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Harrington, Jacob Walter <jwharrin(a)bu.edu> Date: Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 1:55 PM Subject: [Cs-ugrads] IVC Seminar, 1pm - 2pm on 10/12, MCS 148 To: "cs-grads(a)cs.bu.edu" <cs-grads(a)cs.bu.edu>, "cs-ugrads(a)cs.bu.edu" <cs-ugrads(a)cs.bu.edu> Humour, Argument, and Semantics: Learning for Complex Natural Language Tasks Professor Anna Rumshisky, University of Massachusetts Lowell Wednesday, October 12 at 1pm in MCS 148 ABSTRACT In the past few years, deep learning approaches that rely on learned, rather than engineered feature representations have shown excellent results in many natural language prediction and classification tasks, from machine translation to sentiment analysis. Despite the burgeoning success of models that use attention and memory mechanisms to handle problems that require deeper reasoning, many complex natural language tasks still remain out of reach. In this talk, I will discuss our work on several such tasks, including computing semantic similarity of text, argumentation mining, and humour detection. Assessing semantic similarity of text is the holy grail of language understanding and is at the core of many tough NLP problems -- such as entailment recognition or paraphrase detection. I will examine the challenges inherent in this task, present our current results, and discuss possible solutions. Argumentation mining involves identifying relations (such as support or attack) between the claims made in text, and I will discuss our results that apply attention-based pointer networks to this problem. Finally, humour detection requires a combination of multiple divergent aspects of language understanding. I will discuss the effects of integrating different information and outline future directions. BIO Anna Rumshisky is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she heads the Text Machine Lab for NLP. Her primary research area is natural language processing, with applications in computational lexical semantics, temporal reasoning, and clinical informatics, as well as digital humanities and social science. She received her PhD from Brandeis University and completed postdoctoral training at MIT CSAIL. Her work has been funded by National Institutes of Health, Army Research Office, and other government and industry grants. _______________________________________________ Cs-ugrads mailing list Cs-ugrads(a)cs.bu.edu http://cs-mailman.bu.edu/mailman/listinfo/cs-ugrads

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"That Brandeis thing"
by Jeremy Freudberg 11 Oct '16

11 Oct '16

Hello fellow linguists, Description of the event at Brandeis: http://people.brandeis.edu/~smalamud/talking_xylophones.pdf In a convoluted turn of events, I will be *driving* to Brandeis that day. Therefore, I am able to take a certain number of people with me. If you are interested, respond to this email individually. Details about departure time and location are still pending. Best, Jeremy Freudberg

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Events Calendar for the Rest of Fall
by Neil Myler 06 Oct '16

06 Oct '16

Hi everyone, We're happy to announce the BULA event schedule for the rest of Fall, the first of which is tomorrow's GSU Dinner: [image: Inline image 1] Please also remember that the Linguistics Program Open House is coming up on Wednesday, October 26th, at 4.45pm in LSE Room 103! === If you no longer wish to receive emails from this list, follow this link: http://ling.bu.edu/mailman/listinfo/bula <http://ling.bu.edu/mailman/listinfo/bula> Sign up as a BULA member on orgsync: https://orgsync.com/105066/chapter BULA Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BULingAssoc/?fref=ts <https://www.facebook.com/> Linguistics Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BULinguistics/ Linguistics website: http://ling.bu.edu

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Colloquium TONIGHT, 5.30pm, KCB 101; GSU Dinner Friday, GSU Backcourt, 7pm
by Neil Myler 04 Oct '16

04 Oct '16

Hi everyone, Just a reminder that the linguistics program has a colloquium this evening, co-sponsored by the BU African Studies Center. Hope to see you there! Speaker: Rajend Mesthrie (University of Cape Town) Title: *Race, class and Gender in South African English* Time and venue: * TONIGHT 10/4; 5.30pm in KCB Room 101* Abstract: New economic and educational opportunities have given rise to the rapid growth of a black middle-class in South Africa, part of whose making is having its children study at elite schools previously reserved for whites. These “model-C” schools are now important multiracial sites for cross-cultural influences denied to previous generations. The present study tracks the degree to which class and gender relate to acquisition and allegiance to elite varieties of English or more traditional Black South African English. The illustrative variable in this paper is schwa, broken up into seven subsets: initial, final, and medial positions (where there are 5 subtypes in traditional L2 Black South African English, realized as [a e i o u]). Analysis is undertaken via forced alignment of acoustic data and statistics in R. The results give robust evidence of ongoing bifurcation by class and gender. The colloquium is also a facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1762965180629342/ ---- In addition, BULA will be gathering on the GSU Backcourt this Friday at 7pm. Come and grab your own dinner at the GSU, and join us on the backcourt. We'll chat about Rajend Mesthrie's colloquium, a possible trip up to Brandeis on Friday 14 for a linguistics event there (on which more soon), and about language in general. The flyer is below: [image: Inline image 1] This event is also a facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/269991040068057/

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