At this week’s lab meeting Emi Baylor will discuss some of her ongoing research looking at linguistic productivity through the German plural noun inflectional system. Bio and talk abstract are below.

  • Thursday, February 4, 13:30–14:30 (Montréal time, UTC-5).
  • Meetings are via Zoom. If you are interested in attending any of the meetings this semester, please take a moment now to register at this link. After approval, you will receive a confirmation email with the link to join.

Abstract

Theories of linguistic productivity identify the conditions under which rules generalize to new contexts. We implement several variants of one such theory, the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2005, 2016, 2018), and test its predictions. While the project is ongoing, preliminary results indicate that key claims of the analysis of the German plural are not reliably reproducible when the theory is implemented computationally.

Bio

Emi Baylor is a first year MSc student at McGill University and Mila, supervised by Prof. Timothy O’Donnell. Her research areas, generally, are computational linguistics and natural language processing. More specifically, she is interested in computational morphology, NLP for fighting climate change, and multilingual and low-resource NLP. In her spare time, she gets way too into new projects that include learning languages, screenprinting, and building her website (where she might actually make a blog post…some day…). She is always happy to meet new people and chat about any of those topics, so feel free to reach out!