My current research interests lie in
the history of linguistic thought, and the development of machine learning
models for the inference of linguistic structure from raw textual data.
I spent the academic year 2006-2007 working with Bernard Laks at
the Université de Paris X (Nanterre), working on a book entitled Battle
in the Mind Fields, dealing with the development of the mind sciences
in the 20th century.
Since 1997, I have been working on an open-source
computational linguistics project named Linguistica, whose goal
is to automatically develop a morphological analysis of an unknown language
from a raw sample of text, using the tools of information theory to make
explicit what linguistic structure is (see http://linguistica.uchicago.edu).
The two projects are ultimately one, because both are attempts to explicitly
answer the questions: What makes a good linguistic analysis? What is the
relationship between the notions of linguistic learnability and psychological
learnability?
Hmm. Here's how a U of C cartoonist saw me.
Here are slides from a talk at a workshop in Konstanz this coming week, entitled "Optimization
is the answer. Now, what is the question?"
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The Linguistica Project
See our Linguistica homepage at Linguistica.uchicago.edu
for executable,
for source code, and for research papers. This project
is the development of a computer program that automatically performs
morphological analysis of a raw text corpus that you give it.
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Bantu tone
I'm working on two papers on tone in Bantu languages, one on Shi,
based on material in Louise Polak-Bynon's grammar (a brief handout on this), and one on KiHunde,
based on material I have gathered.
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Observations
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and
express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot
measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of
a meagre and unsatisfactory kind. It may be the beginning of knowledge,
but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of
science. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin.
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 The History of Linguistics
Towards a new empiricism is a paper in progress, since the fall of 2006. The point of the paper is to justify a view of linguistics
that sees linguistics as a science and neither a part nor a satellite of psychology, and one that places equal emphasis on
theoretical insight and on empirical coverage. Best of all, it provides an explicit means for testing and justifying
hypotheses, through the good offices of bayesian reasoning, and Minimum Description Length analysis in particular.
A paper (with Bernard Laks, Université de Paris X) on the history of generative phonology.
A recent review article on Bruce Nevin's book on Zellig Harris. (That's a photo of Zellig Harris, on the right.)
My 2004 CLS
paper on the role of the algorithm in generative grammar.
See also the reference to a paper below on information theory,
entropy, and phonology in the 20th century.
Geoff Huck and I wrote a book Ideology
and Linguistic Theory (1995) dealing with generative semantics
and interpretive semantics in the post-Aspects period, showing
how many of the critical suggestions of generative semantics were
integrated into mainstream linguistic thought in following generations,
and that the professional battle waged during this period was often
disconnected from the intellectual issues that were referenced.
One of our earlier papers is available here: Distributionalist
and Mediationalist Themes in the Development of Linguistic Theory.
A review
article on Robert Barsky's Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent.
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Phonology
Along with Jason Riggle and Aris Xanthos, I have been working over the past couple of years on rethinking phonological theory
from a bayesian point of view, asking the question: Can phonology be understood as the search for models that are
the most probable, given what we know of the phonological complexities of the world's languages? Out of this work have
come two papers so far, one focusing on learning phonological categories and the other on treating vowel harmony
in Finnish.
Alan Yu, Jason Riggle, and I are editing a brand-new,
start-from-scratch Second Edition of the Handbook of Phonological
Theory. I edited the first edition, which came out in 1995. A book that I edited, Essential Readings in Phonological Theory, was published by Blackwell's in 1999.
What
is phonology? First chapter of a book that I'm going to finish before too long, probably entitled What is Phonology? This chapter is primarily about flapping in American English.
Probabilistic
models of grammar: phonology as information minimization.
First paper on autosegmental phonology: pretty rough. November 1973 My second paper on autosegmental phonology, but the first one with a theory and a name. Marginal comments from Noam Chomsky. Spring 1974. Strange to look at it now.
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Bioinformatics
Work with Ridg Scott, Terry Clark, and Jing Liu on extending algorithms
that have been developed in computational linguistics to applications
in bioinformatics.
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