Harvard adopts open access mandate. And the person who spearheaded this is none other than Stanford CS NLP alum and Harvard professor Stuart Shieber. Read what Kai von Fintel has to say about this at the Semantics and Pragmatics Editor's Blog. [source: WHISC]

Don't forget the department meeting this Friday and the admissions Open House next week...

And although the program still hasn't been made public, The New Sesquipedalian's crackerjack investigative team has determined that roughly a third of the papers selected for presentation at the upcoming CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) have a Stanford-related author. And quite a few posters too...

That's amazing!

Papers:

• Roger Levy (UCSD)
  A fully rational model of local-coherence effects: modeling uncertainty about the linguistic input in sentence comprehension
• Neal Snider
  Evidence for a Unified Theory of Structural and Lexical Priming
• Nathaniel Smith and Roger Levy (UCSD)
  Surprisal as optimal behavior: a formal model and empirical investigation
• Austin F. Frank and T. Florian Jaeger (U Rochester)
  Models of Speaker Choice in Production: Integrating Information and Availability
• Michael Tanenhaus, Austin Frank, T. Florian Jaeger, Anne Pier Salverda and Mikhail Masharov
  The art of the state: Mixed effects regression modeling in the Visual World
• Zenzi M. Griffin and Jennifer E. Arnold (UNC)
  Attentional resources modulate pronoun use
• Carlos Gómez Gallo, T. Florian Jaeger and Ronald Smyth
  From Message to Syntax: Incremental Syntactic Planning beyond the Clause Level
• T. Florian Jaeger, Evelina Fedorenko, Philip Hofmeister (UCSD) and Edward Gibson
  Expectation-based Syntactic Processing: Anti-locality outside of Head-final Languages
• Laura Staum Casasanto
  Using Social Information in Language Processing
• Susan Wagner Cook, T. Florian Jaeger and Michael Tanenhaus
  Producing Dispreferred Structure

Posters:

• T. Florian. Jaeger and Celeste Kidd
  A Unified Model of Redundancy Avoidance and Strategic Lengthening
• Anuenue Kukona, Whitney Tabor (U Conn) and Sean Hutchins
  Evidence for self-organized parsing: Local coherence facilitation
• Klinton Bicknell, Vera Demberg and Roger Levy
  Local coherences in the wild: An eye-tracking corpus study
• Elizabeth Coppock
  The representation of plans in speech production: Evidence from syntactic blends
• Laura Staum Casasanto and Ivan A. Sag
  Antilocality in Ungrammaticality: Nonlocal grammaticality violations are easier to process
• Roger Levy, Edward Gibson and Evelina Fedorenko
  Expectation-based processing of extraposed structures in English
• Jennifer E. Arnold and Shin-Yi C. Lao
  Egocentric attention influences pronoun comprehension
• Roger Levy and Frank Keller
  Expectation and Memory in Processing of German Verb-final Clauses: Relativization Matters
• Tuan Lam, Duane Watson and Jennifer Arnold
  Effects of repeated mention and predictability on the production of acoustic prominence
• David Race, Michael Tanenhaus, Mary Hare and T. Florian Jaeger
  All we are saying is give primes a chance
• Daniel Casasanto
  Gesture Benefits Language Production, Speech Perception, and Memory
• Alexandros Christodoulou, Lorelle Babwah and Jennifer Arnold
  Effects of production effort on acoustic prominence
• Philip Hofmeister
  The After-Effects of Linguistic Form Choice on Comprehension
• Inbal Arnon and Eve Clark
  Learning irregular plurals -- why irregulars are like regulars
• Hannah Rohde, Roger Levy and Andrew Kehler
  Implicit Causality Biases Influence Relative Clause Attachment

Dear readers:

The New Sesquipedalian would like to thank those of you who wrote in trying to guess the identities of last week's mystery linguists. Alas, the only correct `guess' we received was from John Ohala, who in fact was the person who took the picture back in 1966. While the NeSe is proud to count John among its readers, awarding him a prize for the correct answer seems unfair, given the circumstances...

So, the people in the pictures? Eve Clark and John Lyons. A number of you were half right, mistaking Lyons for Herb Clark. (Sesquitrivia: Actually, Eve was Eve Curme in 1966. It was at this institute that Herb and Eve met for the first time...) Our favorite wrong guess for the identities of the mystery linguists was `Joan Bresnan and Tom Wasow'! (Rest assured - all guessers' identities remain strictly confidential...)

Since we as a community clearly need more practice at identifying linguists from pictures, here's the next mystery linguist whose identity you may contemplate. This picture was taken at a UCLA syntax confab in 1969. First correct answer sent to sesquip@gmail.com wins a double prize.



[HINT: Though perhaps John Lyons was an unfamiliar face, you have definitely seen this linguist. In fact you almost certainly know him.... -The Sesquipeditor]

And while we're practicing our ability to identify linguists, let's practice identifying their names. Meghan says we should start with the following -- a spectogram of the first (given) name of someone in the department. The first person who finds Meghan and gives her (in person) the right answer wins a 'chocolate prize'.

There will be a harder name published each week in the NeSe until the entire department can read spectograms fluently!


Whose name is this?

What Obama Needs to do to Win!

A social, linguistic, and musical commentary

For events farther in the future consult the Upcoming Events Page.

• FRIDAY, 29 FEBRUARY

  • Speech Lunch

    Molly Babel (UC Berkeley)
    Language Attrition: The interaction of bilingualism and language change.
    12:00, ExL Lab
    

  • Representation Roundtable

    Comparing examplar-based models and connectionist models. Discussion led by Jay McClelland.
    1:15-2:15 PM, ExL Lab
    

  • Department Meeting

    To discuss the junior faculty search. All students and faculty welcome.
    
    3:30, MJH 126
    

  • Weekly Social!

    5:00, department lounge
    
• MONDAY, 3 MARCH

  • Berkeley Phonetics and Phonology Forum

    Chen Zhongmin (Berkeley)
    "On the Implosive in the Haiyan Dialect"
    12:00-1:00pm, 46 Dwinelle, Berkeley

  • Phonology Workshop

    Stephanie Shih
    "Prosodic evidence for the lexical status of quasi serial verbs"
    3:15pm, MJH, Chair's Office
• TUESDAY, 4 MARCH

  • NLP Reading Group

    Discussion of Pascal Denis and Jason Baldridge, ' Global, Joint Determination of Anaphoricity and Coreference Resolution using Integer Programming'
    2:30pm, Gates ???
• WEDNESDAY, 5 MARCH

  • Open House Welcome Lunch

    Come meet the prospective grad students
    12 noon in 460:126
    
• THURSDAY, 6 MARCH

  • CSLI CogLunch

    Lera Boroditsky (Psychology)
    "How the languages we speak shape the ways we think"
    12 noon, Cordura Hall 100
    

  • Symbolic Systems Forum

    Jean-Pierre Dupuy (French)
    "Truth in Fiction"
    4:15pm, 380:380C (Math Corner)
    

  • Sociorap

    Katie Drager (U. of Canterbury)
    "Speech Divergence as Performance"
    5:30pm (snacks at 5:15), 460:126
    
• FRIDAY, 7 MARCH

  • Speech Lunch

    TBA
    12 noon in the ExL Lab
    

  • Representation Roundtable

    Abstraction at different levels of linguistic representation (the `grain size' problem)
    1:15-2:15 PM, ExL Lab
    

  • Weekly Social!

    5:00 (or is it 4:00?) in the department lounge
    




• UPCOMING EVENTS (always under construction)
• LINGUISTIC DEPARTMENT EVENTS PAGE
• Got broader interests? The New Sesquipedalian recommends reading or even subscribing to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.
• WHAT'S HAPPENING AT UC SANTA CRUZ?
  
• WHAT'S GOING ON AT UC BERKELEY?
  
• HOW ABOUT MIT? UMass Amherst? U Chicago? Rutgers?

The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of as well as a shortage of O-, O+, A-, A+, B-, and AB-. For an appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies. The Blood Center is also raising money for a new bloodmobile.

Want to contribute information? Want to be a reporter? Want to see something appear here regularly? Want to be a regular columnist? Want to take over running the entire operation? Write directly to sesquip@gmail.com.