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Department of Linguistics graduates record class in 2009-2011
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to announce that it has graduated a record class of 58 students in the 2009-10 academic year, with more to graduate in summer 2010. This class consists of 30 BA, 4 BA/MA, 19 MA and 5 PhD graduates. The Department honored its graduates in a ceremony held Friday, May 7 in Hellems 252, following the University-wide graduation. With Department chair Zygmunt Frajzyngier presiding, faculty members gave short speeches describing the wide variety of research projects undertaken by graduating students, including Honors, MA and PhD theses. A packed house of family members, friends and current students participated in the celebration, which was followed by a reception.
Andrew Cowell publishes first grammar of the Arapaho language
CU Linguistics Professor of French and Linguistics, Andrew J. Cowell, along with native Arapaho speaker Alonzo Moss, Sr., has published the first grammar of the Arapaho language, with University Press of Colorado. Arapaho is an Algonquian language, related to Cheyenne, Cree, Ojibwe, Massachusett and several other languages, but it has evolved in highly unusual directions since splitting off from the larger Algonquian group, both in its sound system and grammatical structure. The grammar provides documentation of these changes, which raise important general questions for the evolution of languages. The grammar complements an earlier collection of Arapaho texts published by Cowell.
Martha Palmer wins 2010 Boulder Faculty Assembly Research Award
Martha Palmer, CU Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, has won a 2010 Boulder Faculty Assembly award for excellence in research. The award recognizes Professor Palmer's stature as one of the foremost computational linguists in the world, and a preeminent figure in the field of computational semantics. Dr. Palmer's research concerns the representation, acquisition, and use of semantic information in computer systems that process language, with a particular focus on the role of verb semantics in such systems. Dr. Palmer has been actively involved in research in natural language processing and knowledge representation for over 20 years, beginning with her pioneering doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh on the use of lexical conceptual structures for driving the semantic interpretation process. This work provided the basis for the highly successful text-processing system, Pundit, built at Unisys during the 1980s and funded by the government agency DARPA. This system combined semantic and pragmatic processing in innovative ways that enabled sophisticated reference resolution and temporal analysis, and led to insights into the use of computational semantics that have continued to inform her research at the University of Colorado. Since her arrival at CU, Dr. Palmer's research has been funded by a wide array of grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense and industry sources. She currently has five grants in force, totaling approximately $2 million. The Boulder Faculty Assembly represents the faculty on the Boulder Campus. It presents up to four faculty awards annually in each of three areas teaching, research and service.
Colorado Linguistics to host 2011 Linguistic Institute
The Colorado Department of Linguistics will host the 2011 Linguistic Institute on the Boulder campus in the summer of 2011, with major sponsorship from the Linguistic Society of America, the largest and oldest professional organization for linguists in the United States. The Linguistic Institute is a biennial training camp for linguists sponsored by the Society at major US universities for over 80 years. Institutes attract over 400 participants, both students and scholars, who choose from a wide range of courses, lectures, and workshops presented by leading scholars in virtually every area of the field. The theme of the 2011 Institute is Language in the World. The organizers of the Boulder Institute have selected most of its course offerings through an open proposal system. The full schedule of courses will be announced in early summer 2010.
CU Linguistics doctoral student Richard Sandoval wins Ford Foundation fellowship
CU Linguistics MA student Richard A. Sandoval has been awarded a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship. The Fellowship provides awards at the predoctoral, dissertation and postdoctoral levels to students who demonstrate excellence, a commitment to diversity and a desire to enter the professoriate. Sandoval will begin the CU doctoral program in Linguistics in the Fall of 2009. In his doctoral work, he will use computational linguistics, theories of second language acquisition and sociolinguistics to model the English-language development of Spanish speakers attending Southwestern urban high schools. Says Sandoval, "the rich sociocultural and linguistic [backgrounds] of the students makes such schools prime locations for the social construction of English structures that differ from the language variety known as Standard English".
Kira Hall wins 2009 Boulder Faculty Assembly Teaching Award
CU Linguistics associate professor Kira Hall has won a 2009 Boulder Faculty Assembly award for teaching excellence. Prof. Hall, who also holds an appointment in the CU Anthropology department, specializes in sociolinguistics, with a focus on the role of language in the construction of identity. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, bilingualism and the role of language in nationalism and globalization. Her research activities include extensive fieldwork among liminal communities in Northern India. In addition to teaching the highly popular undergraduate courses Language and US Society and Language and Gender, she teaches graduate courses in sociolinguistics, advises a large body of doctoral students and serves as program director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP). The Boulder Faculty Assembly, the representative body of faculty on the Boulder Campus, presents up to four faculty awards annually in each of three areas teaching, research and service.
CU linguists win National Science grant for new-generation Hindi/Urdu Lexicon
CU Linguistics professors Martha Palmer and Bhuvana Narasimhan have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant, Collaborative Research: A Multi-Representational and Multi-Layered Treebank for Hindi/Urdu, to develop linguistic annotation for these two closely related languages of India/Pakistan. The project is a collaborative effort involving researchers at the India Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, India, the Universities of Washington and Massachusetts and Columbia University. It will produce a database of close to a million words of Hindi and Urdu annotated with syntactic structure (both dependency structure and phrase structure) and semantic-role labels (PropBank). The researchers will also create a process for automatically converting between the different representations. The first project meeting is scheduled for January 2009 in Hyderabad, India. Such efforts have led to significant advances in the efficacy of natural-language processing by providing training data for supervised machine-learning algorithms.
Martha Palmer receives new DARPA grants for research in computational semantics
Martha Palmer, CU associate professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, has received two new grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to perform semantic annotation of large language databases for machine translation and other natural-language processing applications. The aim of the first project is to expand the Propbank database developed by Dr. Palmer for for English and Chinese; the aim of the second is to build a pilot Propbank database for Arabic. The Arabic Propbank pilot project involves researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, as well as CU Linguistics PhD student Aous Mansouri, who is serving as a research assistant on the project.
CU Linguistics faculty featured in CU Boulder news podcasts on vanishing languages
CU Linguistics professors Andrew Cowell, David Rood and Zygmunt Frajzyngier are featured in new CU podcasts. The CU Boulder podcast channel features official news and feature stories from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the podcasts, the three researchers describe their work with endangered languages in Oklahoma (Wichita), Wyoming (Arapaho) and in Africa (Gidar). They explain the role of language documentation in the preservation of vanishing knowledge systems and cultures.
David Rood receives National Science Foundation grant for Lakota documentation
David S. Rood, CU Professor of Linguistics, has received a National Science Foundation grant that will underwrite large-scale video documentation of Lakota, an indigenous language of the northern plains with approximately 8,000-9,000 living speakers. The grant will provide full support to three Lakota speakers for three years each, starting in the Fall of 2007. The support packages will enable these students to earn the MA degree in Linguistics while assisting in the video documentation of everyday Lakota conversation. The Lakota documentation effort will join an array of research and outreach projects already underway at the CU Center for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the West.
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