Research Opportunities in Linguistics

From lingwiki

Research Exchange

This page serves as a research exchange for faculty and graduate students in linguistics who are seeking research assistance and undergraduates who are looking for opportunities to take part in research.

Posts concerning research assistance should include:

• Title of the project
• Specific tasks/duties you would like done
• Any specific skills or abilities that are required
• Time commitment expected (ex. 3 hours per week, a total of 40 hours over the course of the summer, up to 20 hours total, etc.)
• Start date
• Compensation information (Uncompensated, experience only? UROP? Course credit? Work-study? Hourly rate?)
• Contact information
• Status of the project as "open" or "closed"

Once the project is finished or you have enough help, please mark the position as closed or delete the posting.

Open Research Positions

Semantics & Baseball (OPEN, Prof. Ezra Keshet): Looking for students to help transcribe radio broadcasts of baseball games in order to examine how this language encodes the action going on in the game. Time commitment can vary from 1 game (4-5 hours' work) up to as many games as you want, starting in early May. Work is uncompensated, but credit opportunities are possible. Email me at ekeshet@umich.edu if you are interested.

Database of Phonetic Symbols (SOMEWHAT OPEN, Terry Szymanski): I'm looking for volunteers to enter data into an electronic database of phonetic symbols in current or past use by linguists. This database will have applications in language-processing software and could help improve optical character recognition of scanned linguistic texts. Work as much or as little as you like. No compensation: email tdszyman@umich.edu

Discourse Prosody (OPEN, Joseph Tyler): Looking for a volunteer to help measure prosodic features (e.g. amplitude, speech rate) in spoken recordings. You would be working with Praat and a Praat script I have written to automatically collect new prosodic measures to correlate with the discourse structure of a news article. The goal of the project is to see what prosodic measures speakers use that indicate the large-scale structure of spoken language. Experience with Praat preferred. Time commitment is flexible, although initial tasks may take 5 hours. No compensation. Email me at jctyler@umich.edu if you are interested.

Multi-Lingual Grammar Annotation (OPEN, Terry Szymanski): I am assembling a corpus of electronic texts of language description materials (i.e. grammars and lexicons) for as many languages as possible. I am looking for volunteer (unpaid, non-credit) help in building this corpus. Duties include:

• Search the internet to find relevant electronic texts and add them to the corpus
• Annotate texts using the GATE annotation software. Annotation includes labeling foreign words in the text and identifying glosses of these words within the text.
• Work on any language or language family that interests you
• Get experience using NLP tools (GATE: the General Architecture for Text Engineering) and concepts in language documentation, language engineering, information extraction, and machine learning

Contact Terry Szymanski tdszyman@umich.edu if you are interested.

Adaptive eye movements in reading (OPEN, Michael Shvartsman and Dr. Rick Lewis): We are interested in understanding how people people move their eyes while reading. More specifically, we want to understand how people adapt their eye movement patterns while reading both to their own underlying cognitive / motor constraints, and to the specific reading task in front of them. Interested undergraduates will get a chance to learn how to work with a head-mounted eye-tracker, as well as learn about cutting-edge theories of adaptive control and lexical processing. Opportunities to learn data analysis in R and get involved in computational modeling are available as well. Currently for lab/research credit only (including summer). Email mshvarts@umich.edu if interested.