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Summer HappeningsNotes from the Farm and the field: Rebecca Greene: I have been in Tokyo all summer. I did a 6-week Japanese language course at International
Christian University, and last week I went to Hirosaki in Northern Japan to research attitudes toward the local
dialect there, for my first qp.
Arnold Zwicky:
I spent the summer here in Palo Alto (except for a weekend in Santa Cruz for a shapenote singing convention),
mostly getting my life back into order after so many deranged years, but also enjoying my new granddaughter, Opal
Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky, and working with various graduate students: Liz Coppock, Bruno Estigarribia, and Laura Staum, plus Luc Baronian's
and Veronica Gerassimova's dissertations, and occasional meetings with a number of others. For fun, I did occasional
postings to the American Dialect Society mailing list and to the Language Log.
Chris Manning:
Dan Jurafsky, Roger Levy and a bunch of other people from
the Natural Language Processing Group traveled to Barcelona for the 2004
meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held as an
event at Forum Barcelona 2004. We presented several papers on grammar
induction, discontinuous dependencies, parsing, and joint learning. And
we took in a bit of Barcelona: I chose a hotel so that I had to
walk past Casa Batllo, my favorite Gaudi building, every morning on the
way to the metro.... More recently, I have been spending my days at
Legoland, San Diego and Stanford Sierra Camp.
Michael Deeringer:
I've spent the majority of the summer interning at CSLI, listening to
meetings all day. Peppered here and there were visits to Sacramento and
Southern California to visit the family, including my 10-month-old niece, and I've been reading
tons on my own time, so I've been
keeping myself busy. Coolest moments thus far: 4th of July on a beach in
Ventura, attending a 50th birthday party fit for royalty, and moving into
a new apartment!
Lauren Hall-Lew:
This summer I spent most of my time with Arizona cattle ranchers! I drove a lot of dirt
roads and long stretches of interstate and ended up with about 20 hours of interviews that
I've spent the rest of the summer analyzing. I've been revising my previous work on
Arizona dialect and working on a joint paper with Mary Rose for NWAV33 later this month.
In other news I'm a TA/RA for John Rickford's Sophomore College class this month. We've
been preparing all summer for a packed three weeks of fieldtrips and guest speakers, which
means I've gotten to know some great people in the Stanford and broader Bay Area
community. As I write this, the program begins tomorrow, and I'm really looking forward to
my first TA experience.
Throughout the summer I've also been learning and brainstorming about a project on
automatic question answering headed by Dan Jurafsky and the teams at the University of
Colorado and Columbia University. The project's focus is on detecting opinion questions,
and it's probably no surprise that I've been interested in the detection of opinion-holders,
and related questions of speak attribution.
And that, plus a few good novels and many good movies, has been my summer '04.
Doug Ball:
I went to the LFG '04 Conference in Christchurch. Despite the conference
being so far away from the Bay Area, I caught up with a few current
students, a few faculty members, and several former students, in addition
to seeing the beautiful hometown of Melanie Owens and Lis Norcliffe.
Part of my summer was spent "holed up in the office" looking at argument
realization in several Austronesian languages, principally Tagalog and
Bahasa Indonesia (working with Beth Levin, Peter Sells, and Melanie
Owens). I'm now much familiar with the Tagalog voice system than I was at
the beginning of the summer.
Micha Rinkus:
This is me on the streets of Moscow distributing a
semantics survey on English loanwords in Russian.
It was smooth sailing once I stopped taking visibly drunk applicants (sample bias?).
Julie Sweetland:
I worked with John and Tommy Grano on our annotated bibliography on vernaculars and education.
A version of it should appear by mid-September in Journal of English Linguistics.
I also wrote a lot of lesson plans for my dissertation project.
Tom Wasow:
I spent much of the summer working on a corpus study of the factors that
influence the presence vs. absence of relativizers in English non-subject
relative clauses. That is, what leads someone to say 'the book I've been
reading' as opposed to 'the book that I've been reading' (or 'the book
which I've been reading')? In collaboration with Dave Orr, a Symbolic
Systems undergraduate, and Florian Jaeger, a Linguistics graduate student,
I have been extracting and analyzing data on this phenomenon from the
Switchboard corpus, a richly annotated collection of transcripts of
telephone conversations. We have found quite a number of linguistic
factors that correlate with the presence or absence of relativizers. We
are still in the process of data analysis, and we are looking for
explanations of the correlations we have found. At the end of August, I
gave a talk about the preliminary results at a workshop on empirical
syntax at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Dave, Florian, and I are
continuing to work on this and plan to include a paper on it in an
anthology coming out of the Berlin workshop.
Phil Hubbard:
Besides moving out of my office in 460 (sigh) here are some of the things
I did this summer: In July I went to a 4-day workshop at Berkeley taught by the American Council on the
Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) on conducting and rating oral proficiency
interviews. I had the worst cold of my life and lost my voice. It was fun.
In early September, I went to the EuroCALL (European Association for
Computer Assisted Language Learning) conference in Vienna and presented a
paper on "Using Google as a Tool for Writing Instruction" and to Antwerp
for the 11th International CALL Conference where I presented "Some
Subject, Treatment, and Data Collection Trends in Current CALL Research."
Mary Rose:
I've mainly been holed up in my office, text-gridding sound files in praat
in preparation for measuring vowels - in my interviews of elders in rural
Wisconsin. I've also been working with Lauren on our cool project
comparing dialect of different types who work with cows - ranchers in
Arizona vs. dairy farmers in Wisconsin. I've also been growing a big belly
- which will deflate sometime around November 1.
Joan Bresnan:
During the summer of 2004 I worked with junior Anna Cueni on a VPUE
project on quantitative syntax. I also worked with the Paraphrase
Link group at Stanford (Tom Wasow, Annie Zaenen, Tatiana Nikitina,
Neal Snider, and Anna Cueni). I attended the LFG Winterschool in
Christchurch, where I gave an invited evening lecture, "Explaining
Syntactic Variation: Two Approaches to the Dative Alternation". I
also attended the LFG'04 conference and business meeting, where the
proposal to hold LFG 2007 at Stanford in conjunction with the LSA
Summer Institute was enthusiastically approved.
Finally, I did two bike tours with my partner Marianne: in July I
toured the Northland of New Zealand (around 250 miles), and in August
I rode down the coast of California from Portola Valley to Santa
Barbara (335 miles). I was pleased to be on the bicycle again after
doing so many logistic regressions...
Bruno Estigarribia:
During the summer I was involved in two projects. With Eve, we are co-writing a couple
of papers on acquisition of labels for objects and names for their properties.
We want to know how parents present labels and properties, how they use gesture in combination
with speech and how they manage the kids' attention. With Arnold, I did a critical bibliography of
auxiliariless and subjectless questions in English, work that I presented in the summer workshop.
I also went to Yosemite and Wawona, and to Big Sur, got bitten by a tick,
learned a lot about California flowers, and got my permanent resident card!
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AUTUMN WELCOME PARTY!Annual Autumn Welcome Party
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