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2/27/23

Big congratulations to Masato Nakamura, whose dissertation on "Sources of argument role insensitivity in verb processing" has received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant (2240434) from the National Science Foundation, with the support of advisor Colin Phillips. Abstract below, along with links to some of the past awards made to our dissertators.

Sources of argument role insensitivity in verb processing

Humans generally understand utterances quickly and accurately, even in noisy or degraded environments for listening or reading. Many researchers have attributed this success to people’s ability to rapidly predict upcoming words. Previous studies have demonstrated various kinds of evidence for prediction mechanisms, e.g., more predictable words are read more quickly. But less is known about the mechanisms by which predictions are generated. This project investigates these mechanisms, by focusing on situations where people appear to make inappropriate predictions. A useful test case is “role reversed” sentence pairs, such as “the customer that the waitress had served” and “the waitress that the customer served”, in which who did what to whom is reversed. Some psycholinguistic measures of prediction, particularly those involving comprehension, suggest that the verb “served” is equally expected in both sentences, despite being inappropriate in the second. This has been taken as evidence that humans ignore the roles of nouns when generating expectations. However, some other measures of prediction suggest that humans generate appropriate expectations in those same sentences, making full use of role information. This project seeks to resolve this discrepancy.

The project combines computational and experimental methods to investigate why different measures indicate a greater or lesser role for semantic roles in moment-by-moment prediction in language. The project will develop a computational model of linguistic prediction that seeks to capture how a shared set of cognitive processes maps onto different experimental measures. The model will be extended based on results from new experiments. In order to understand the time course of predictions and the contributions of different task elements, the experiments will systematically vary whether or not participants are shown anomalous continuations, and what kind of response participants are required to give. The project also develops and refines a scalable pipeline for semi-automatic analysis of spoken language data in psycholinguistic experiments, which can be used by other researchers.

Assistant Professor of Art Cy Keener Collaborates on a New Exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences

Date of Publication: 
2022-11-28
11/10/22

By Tom Ventsias 

Mandated face coverings vs. no masking. Fourteen days of isolation or five. Online schooling or crowded classrooms. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic at times seems like a cacophony of mixed messaging from public health experts and government officials.

Much of this variance stems from the evolution and tenacity of the virus itself. Yet other factors—pandemic fatigue, physical location, demographics, politics, and the timing and tone of the messaging itself—have fueled varying levels of public skepticism and confusion.

To meet this challenge, University of Maryland researchers are developing sophisticated predictive models and best communication practices needed to combat future pandemics. They’re crunching voluminous data from the current pandemic—analyzing social media content, epidemiological statistics and public statements from officials—to build a seamless, end-to-end network that considers complex and interdependent biological, environmental and human factors.

Their work is funded by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, part of the organization’s new Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention Program.

A main goal of the UMD project is to develop a digital platform, called PandEval (pandemic evaluation), that can zero in on specific locales, offering a level of detail not widely available during the current pandemic.

“What we’ve seen is a need to improve messaging and policymaking at the local scale,” said Neil Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management in the School of Public Health. “Public acceptance for health-related mandates—things like a statewide shutdown of non-essential businesses—could look very different in Montgomery County than on the Lower Eastern Shore.”

Sehgal, whose work is focused on novel and emerging digital health technologies and their applicability to health care delivery and outcomes, is joined on the project by a multi-institutional team of computational social scientists and data scientists, public health experts, biostatisticians and epidemiologists.

It includes Louiqa Raschid, a dean’s professor of information systems in the Robert H. Smith School of Business who is principal investigator of the award; Vanessa Frias-Martinez, an associate professor in the College of Information Studies; Xiaoli Nan, a professor of communication in the College of Arts and Humanities; Kristina Lerman, a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California; and Eili Klein, M.D., an associate professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

Raschid and Frias-Martinez have joint appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, which is providing administrative and technical support for the project.

To develop robust algorithms for the PandEval platform, the researchers are curating data that includes almost two billion Twitter posts since January 2020, social media captures from Facebook, GPS digital footprints from location intelligence companies, face masking statistics from a New York Times database and inoculation data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The team will use Twitter and Facebook posts to develop social media-based models of community beliefs and attitudes, offering a window into areas like science skepticism, concern about vaccine safety, a lack of trust in public officials or an unwillingness to contribute to the public good.

Nan and Sehgal are also developing digital tools to evaluate the effectiveness of public health messaging, with a focus on building models that help identify the best person or organization to deliver the right message at the right time.

Frias-Martinez will use her extensive experience in mobility tracking to analyze the GPS data, creating new models to guide safe behavior during pandemics. The software would track activities via smartphones or other mobile devices, and then match it to disease vector models, offering actionable data on whether people should work from home or use public transportation systems.

“We think the benefits of PandEval will be twofold: increasing trust and confidence in our public health infrastructure and giving decision makers epidemiological models that are customized to specific population segments,” said Raschid. “This can be invaluable for things like vaccine rollouts and health-related mandates.”

9/14/21

September 14, 2022

By Chris Carroll

Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle

The best museums are such a delight that visitors barely notice they’re leaving with widened perspectives to complement souvenir mugs.

Traditional research studies can be quite different for participants—mystifying, maybe a little boring. And rather than knowledge, the takeaway is money or points in a college class.

A new partnership between researchers at UMD, Howard and Gallaudet universities and D.C.’s recently launched Planet Word museum mashes up the two experiences, where the learning and fun facilitate the science and extend the study pool beyond campus.

Starting this summer, student researchers at the Language Science Station lab in Planet Word are inviting guests to participate in several brief studies: one aimed at understanding how knowledge of a subject influences language use, another examining what non-signing people understand about American Sign Language, and a third exploring how the brain guesses what’s next in a sentence.

“This has to be fun and educational for visitors,” says Charlotte Vaughn, assistant research professor in UMD’s Maryland Language Science Center and leader of the overall project, which is supported by a $470,000 award from the National Science Foundation.

More studies are planned, and the researchers’ broader goals are to expand the diversity of linguistic researchers and develop best practices for meaningful, engaging research in public settings.

“We’re exploring how to change participants’ experience for the better while maintaining scientific rigor,” Vaughn says. “Guests are excited to participate in real research during their visit to the museum—research that will result in new findings and knowledge."

8/2/22

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The University of Maryland has received a nearly $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that will support efforts to improve the way handwritten documents from the premodern Islamicate world—primarily in Persian and Arabic—are turned into machine-readable text for use by academics or the public. 

Assistant Professor Matthew Thomas Miller and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Parkes Allen, both of the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, will work with researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), led by computer scientist Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, on the innovative humanities-computer science collaboration. UCSD received its own $300,000 award.    

Over three years, the researchers will work in the domain of handwritten text recognition, which are methods designed to automatically read a diversity of human handwriting types with high levels of accuracy. 

“This work has the potential to remove substantial roadblocks for digital study of the premodern Islamicate written tradition and would be really transformative for future studies of these manuscripts,” Miller said. “We are very grateful to the NSF for its support.” 

This latest research proposal builds on a number of ongoing efforts to develop open-source technology to expand digital access to manuscripts and books from the premodern Islamicate world in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu; Miller currently leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers on a $1.75 million grant from the Mellon Foundation as well as a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

There are hundreds of thousands—perhaps even millions—of premodern Islamicate books and manuscripts spanning over 1,500 years, from the 7th–19th centuries, forming perhaps the largest archive of cultural production of the premodern world. Scanning and digitization efforts over the last decade have made images of Islamicate manuscripts in a large number of collections available to the public. However, they remain mostly “locked” for digital search and manipulation because the text has not been transcribed into digital text.  

The task is made more difficult by the diversity and intricacy of many Arabic manuscripts, said Allen, who is a historian of early modern Ottoman religious and cultural history. They may be written alongside diagonal notes, annotations and corrections, in multiple colors and “hands.” 

Under the NSF grant, researchers will develop new techniques that remove the need for extensive manual—or human—labor, a method known as “unsupervised” transcription. Eventually, the tools under development will produce models that will be able to automatically transcribe large quantities of Persian and Arabic script in a multitude of different styles with substantially higher degrees of accuracy than is currently possible.

“The Arabic script tradition is so extensive and so broad,” Allen said. “People need to be able to read these manuscripts, search within them, and integrate them into their research.” 

Image: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. or. oct. 3759

4/5/22

We Have an Artist on Our Team

 

In addition to an oceanographer, climatologist, data scientist, and outreach educator, we are lucky to have an artist as a Co-PI (primary investigator) on our team.

 

Cy Keener installing his Light Ice Mass Balance Buoy 100 miles north of Barrow Point on the Arctic Ocean. Photo by John Woods

Cy Keener is an interdisciplinary artist who uses environmental sensing and kinetic sculpture to record and represent the natural world. He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Emerging Technology in the Department of Art. His work includes a range of data-based installations to visualize diverse phenomena including sea ice, wind, rain and ocean waves. He received a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University, and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Cy has completed commissioned installations at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Stanford University, Suyama Space in Seattle, and the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas.

Check out short videos of Cy's work on Vimeo.

Listen to Embedded.fm Episode 365: Barbed Wire Fence and Great Wifi with Cy Keener

 

//19.piksel.no/2019/11/21/digital-ice-core/Digital Ice Core re-presents ambient light readings in the ice and ocean at full scale. photo from https://19.piksel.no/2019/11/21/digital-ice-core/

 

The image above was the piece Cy created after the March 2019 IABP trip to Utqiagvik, Alaska to deploy RGB light and temperature sensors through the sea ice. The data was shared real-time through satellite technology and was displayed as light in the Digital Ice Core. This light sculpture re-presents ambient light readings in the ice and ocean below at full scale, recorded at noon local time between April 5 and June 14, 2019. The sculpture enables viewers to experience a critical but vanishing aspect of the Arctic environment through open source electronics and data.

The Light Ice Mass Balance buoy Cy deployed on April 3, 2022 on this trip, will inspire another art installation in the coming year or so.

 

Cy Keener assembling ice cadet buoysCy Keener assembling ice cadet buoys before deploying them.

The University of Maryland's Brain and Behavior Institute, in partnership with the University of Houston, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab at Rice University (along with the University of Maryland's Arts for All initiative) is pleased to announce that registration is open for an International Workshop on the Neural and Social Basis of Creative Movement to be held April 7–10 at the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia.

This multi-day convening will bring together scientists, dancers, choreographers, composers, and conceptual artists to focus a multi-disciplinary lens on the interactions between the brain, the body, and emotion. Visiting scholars include leaders in the fields of neuroscience, linguistics, aesthetics, and the arts. I invite you to explore the full list of participants here.

Registration information can be found here, and one can attend either in person or virtually. Arts for All can support the registration fee for a limited number of students. If you are interested, please reach out to Associate Dean Patrick Warfield at pwarfiel@umd.edu.

10/12/21

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Students of science in the United States are likely to recognize the names and discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo and Charles Darwin. Fewer may know of the many influential curanderos, cosmologists and agriculturists from across the Americas whose work has impacted science across the globe for centuries. 

Thanks to a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, a new project led by Professor of History Karin Rosemblatt aims to establish how Latin America’s popular, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities were “never on the periphery of scientific developments.” 

“We aim to shift emphasis away from the discoveries of a few scientific geniuses and to foreground instead the many contributors to scientific work—porters, local guides, wives and family members, technicians, herbal specialists,” said Rosemblatt, who is also the director of UMD’s Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies. 

The project, “Placing Latin America and the Caribbean in the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine,” will bring together senior and established researchers and graduate students in the field of HSTEM (History of Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine) in Latin America and the Caribbean. The network will secure ties among researchers in North and South America, produce publications that make their research widely available and provide training and mentoring to graduate students.  

Rosemblatt, whose research focuses on the transnational study of gender, race, ethnicity and class, has already coordinated a 13-person steering committee made up of scholars at different stages of their careers working in Latin America and the United States. The committee members specialize in different time periods, geographic regions and topics. They include: Miruna Achim (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, Mexico City); Eve Buckley (University of Delaware); Marcos Cueto (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Rio de Janeiro); Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania); Pablo F. Gómez (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Carlos López Beltrán (National Autonomous University of Mexico); Camilo Quintero (UNIANDES, Colombia); Megan Raby (University of Texas at Austin); Julia Rodriguez (University of New Hampshire); Carlos Sanhueza Cerda (Universidad de Chile); Elisa Sevilla Perez (Universidad de San Francisco, Quito); and Adam Warren (University of Washington, Seattle). Ana Luísa Reis Castro (MIT) will serve as graduate student representative. 

Next steps involve growing the network and building out a website. 

Through the materials produced by the network, teachers of students of all ages will also gain access to bibliographies, lesson plans, essays and collections of syllabi that allow them to cover a broader range of scientific endeavors and a more diverse community of scientists, Rosemblatt said. 

“We hope to convince other historians, students and the broader public that the Western scientific tradition developed in conversation with other, often colonized, peoples,” she said.   

Image: “Two views of Cabo Tres Montes” (Chile), 1891, via memoriachilena.cl

10/28/21

There are myriad benefits to learning a new language—from conversing with people from other backgrounds, to easing international travel, to advancing your career. But acquiring a new language as an adult is not always easy, particularly if a person is trying to distinguish phonetic sounds not often heard in their native language.

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Laboratory at the University of Maryland are exploring this phenomenon, using computational modeling to investigate learning mechanisms that can help listeners adapt their speech perception of a new language.

Naomi Feldman (left), an associate professor of linguistics with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, is principal investigator of the $496K grant(link is external).

Feldman is overseeing five students in the CLIP Lab who are heavily involved in the project, including two who are pictured below. Craig Thorburn(link is external) (right), is a fourth-year doctoral student in linguistics, and Saahiti Potluri (left), is an undergraduate double majoring in applied mathematics and finances.

For their initial work, the researchers are taking a closer look at the specific difficulties native Japanese speakers face when learning English.

As an adult, it is often difficult to alter the speech categories that people have experienced since childhood, particularly as it relates to non-native or unfamiliar speech sounds. For example, native English speakers can easily distinguish between the “r” and “l” sound, which native Japanese speakers are not accustomed to.

Feldman’s research team is developing two types of computational models based on adult perceptual learning data: probabilistic cue weighting models, which are designed to capture fast, trial-by-trial changes in listeners’ reliance on different parts of the speech signal; and reinforcement learning models, which are designed to capture longer term, implicit perceptual learning of speech sounds. Thorburn and Potluri are working on the latter models.

With guidance from Feldman, the two researchers are exploring a reward-based mechanism that research suggests is particularly effective in helping adults acquire difficult sound contrasts when learning a second language.

“We're trying to uncover the precise mechanism that makes learning so effective in this paradigm,” Thorburn says. “This appears to be a situation in which people are able to change what they learned as an infant, something we refer to as having plasticity—the ability of the brain to adapt—in one’s representations. If we can pin down what is happening in this experiment, then we might be able understand what causes plasticity more generally.”

Potluri says that the powerful computational resources provided by UMIACS are critical to the project, noting that the model they are working with goes through hundreds of audio clips and “learns” over thousands of trials.

“The lab's servers can run these experiments in a matter of hours. Whereas with less computational power, it would literally take days to run a single experiment,” she says. “After running the model, we also need to analyze the massive datasets generated by the trials, and they are easier to store and manipulate—without concerning memory issues—on the lab's servers.”

Potluri says it was her interest in learning languages and a desire to get involved in linguistics research that drew her to apply to work in CLIP as an undergraduate. Despite having very little previous coursework in the subject, she and Feldman found that the NSF-funded project was a great area for her to exercise her knowledge in math while gaining new skills.

Feldman says the complementary skill sets of Thorburn and Potluri make them a good team to assist on the project.

“Craig and Saahiti have interests that are very interdisciplinary—spanning everything from language science to computer science to applied math—which makes them a perfect fit for research that uses computational models to study how people learn language,” she says. “Their collaborative work has already proven to be very impressive, and I am glad to have them on our team.”

—Story by Melissa Brachfeld

10/8/21

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Starting next summer, University of Maryland language scholars will have a new place to conduct their research and a new source of participants for their studies: the Planet Word museum in downtown Washington, D.C. and its visitors.

A new $440,000 grant from the National Science Foundation funds a partnership between UMD, Howard University and Gallaudet University and Planet Word to advance research and public understanding about the science of language.

For example, experiments may look at what non-signing people believe about what makes various American Sign Language signs hard or easy to learn, why it’s easier to understand the speech of people we know rather than strangers, or whether we think differently when reading a text message versus formal writing.

The experiments will be interactive and fun, said Assistant Research Professor in UMD’s Maryland Language Science Center Charlotte Vaughn, who is leading the project.

“Language is already the topic of conversation at the museum, so there’s an unparalleled opportunity for our studies and activities about language science to be a seamless and memorable part of visitors’ experience,” she said.

Planet Word, opened in late 2020 and housed in the historic Franklin School building, aims to show the depth, breadth and fun of words, language and reading. Faculty from UMD’s Maryland Language Science Center, the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and the Department of English were involved in shaping the museum’s vision and programming. It has been a hope of the museum’s founder, Ann Friedman, to also have it be a space for research and discovery.

In addition to Vaughn, the lead project team includes Associate Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences Yi Ting Huang and postdoc affiliate in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences Julie Cohen at UMD, as well as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Howard University Patrick Plummer and Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Gallaudet University Deanna Gagne. Other personnel include Jan Edwards and Rochelle Newman, both professors in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at UMD; Colin Phillips, professor in the Department of Linguistics at UMD; and Laura Wagner, professor in the Department of Psychology at the Ohio State University.

Vaughn said the opportunity to partner with a historically Black university and the world's only liberal arts university for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people will allow for significant progress on issues central to the field.

“Engaging the diverse Planet Word audience in our activities will make our research stronger, more representative, and more widely accessible,” Vaughn said. “At the same time, our collaborative partnership, plus offering unique research experiences to students underrepresented in the field, works toward diversifying the future of the language sciences.”

The grant also funds the development of a training course in public-facing research, which will be offered for the first time at Planet Word next summer. Though offered through UMD, the course will be open to students from across the region. Those who take part will help lead the research studies, set to begin around the same time.

“Participating in public-facing research is an excellent opportunity for students,” said Huang. “Communicating science to broad audiences involves developing ways to hook people into engaging with questions when they have limited familiarity with the topic and unraveling scientific puzzles through the format of conversations.”

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