Research Opportunities in Linguistics

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Revision as of 17:25, 23 April 2012

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

A Reception Study of "Genre in Three Traditions" (OPEN, John Swales)

Researcher: John M. Swales (jmswales@umich.edu), Professor Emeritus of Linguistics

This project (for a plenary to be delivered at the end of June) involves tracking who has cited a 1996 paper, "Genre in three traditions", and why.

The project might appeal particularly to somebody also interested in Information Science. Work involves using Google scholar, Scopus and Web of Science to trace the considerable citation history of this article, incidentally written by someone with a PhD in linguistics from Michigan.

Alas my research funds are almost exhausted; Independent study is possible.

Make Warlpiri movies! (OPEN, Prof. Carmel O'Shannessy) I need students to make short movies of Warlpiri children telling stories, from recordings I made in which children tell stories from picture books. You would use Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or iMovie to link an audio file with pictures, and make these into a 3 – 5 minute movie. When the movie plays, we will see the pictures and hear a child telling a story in Warlpiri. Most story tellers have a long pause between pages, so even though you don’t know Warlpiri, you can tell where the next part of the story starts. I will give you a gloss of the vocabulary items, so that you can check. Also, I’ll check each movie to make sure everything is ok. You could work on your own laptop, in the Media Center in the MLB, in the Duderstadt Center, or sometimes in our Sociolinguistics lab in Lorch Hall.

The video editing skills needed are easy to learn, so editing experience is not required, but would help.

The project might take 60 hours or more, over the rest of the term. There are minimally 40 short movies to make, and more if possible. Several students could work on the project, independently.

I will take the movies to the community in the summer, and give them to the children and to the school. Imagine how delighted the children will be, hearing themselves in a movie! You could contribute to their enjoyment of Warlpiri (a highly endangered language)!

Email me at: carmelos@umich.edu if you are interested.

Semantics & Baseball (SUSPENDED, 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.

Multi-Lingual Grammar Annotation (CLOSED for now, 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.

Processing of Modern Greek phonetics data (OPEN, Jon Yip): I am looking for volunteers to help me process a fairly large amount of ultrasound video, camera video, and audio recorded during the production of Modern Greek consonants. Tasks include:

• Data file conversion, processing, and back-up
• Annotation using Praat TextGrids to label acoustic intervals in sound files
• (For students with advanced knowledge of phonetics:) Semi-automated measurement of sound gestures in real-time ultrasound and camera video imagery

This project could take up to 30-50 hours, depending on how quickly work progresses, and will occur from April to September 2012. Work is currently uncompensated, but research credit opportunities (such as independent study with a faculty supervisor) may be possible. Contact Jon Yip at: jonyip@umich.edu if you're interested.