I posted our handout from our NELS talk yesterday here. We illustrate two points: a corrolary of Logical Phonology (LP) called delete the rich, pertaining to segment deletion rules, and how LP handles apparent cases of non-derived environment blocking. In doing so, we give a relatively detailed phonology of Hungarian h and also address the famous case of Turkish velar deletion.
I’ll post the MS for the proceedings to LingBuzz once it’s ready.
My paper with Charles Reiss on metaphony in Logical Phonology is now accepted to appear in a special issue of Phonology. As it happens, it includes problems I originally posed here on this blog (1 2 3). I have also updated the version on LingBuzz to include various changes recommended by the reviewers and editors.
I recently gave a talk at the Canadian Linguistic Association (sort of like the LSA, but Canadian and frankly a lot better because it doesn’t have nearly as many prominent crackpots and cranks) with Charles Reiss on the notion of “exchange rules” as they’re understood in Logical Phonology (LP). Whereas SPE-era theories can use alpha-notation to generate exchange rules, LP can model exchange processes via a series of seemingly complex rules, either via a Duke of York gambit or opportunistic abuse of underspecification. Since it seems quite likely that purely phonological exchanges don’t in fact exist, we suggest that the language acquisition device is constrained so as to not profer analyses of those types, though we also consider that this may be an accident of the “diachronic filter” of the sort developed by Ju. Blevins, M. Hale, and J. Ohala. The handout is here for those interested, and like other things we’ve been writing about LP, will probably be included in a forthcoming book. One interesting question that we raise, but don’t answer, is what one ought to do about exchanges in Optimality Theory. Alderete (2001), for example, proposes to model them with a family of “anti-faithfulness constraints”. While one could predict the absence of exchanges by eliminating this constraint family, Alderete also uses anti-faithfulness for phenomena other than exchanges, and some of these may be more robustly attested; it’s not clear what ought to be done thus.
Alderete, J. 2001. Dominance effects as transderivational anti-faithfulness. Phonology 18: 201-253.
Charles Reiss (h/t) recently recommended me a short book by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934), an important Spanish neuroscientist and physician. Cajal first published the evocatively titled Reglas y Consejos sobre Investigación Cientifica: Los tónicos de la voluntad in 1897 and it was subsequently revised and translated various times since then. By far the most entertaining portion for me is chapter 5, entitled “Diseases of the Will”. Despite the name, what Cajal actually presents is a taxonomy of scientists who do contribute little to scientific inquiry: “contemplators”, “bibliophiles and polyglots”, “megalomaniacs”, “instrument addicts”, “misfits”, and “theorists”. I include a PDF of this brief chapter, translated into English, here for interested readers, under my belief it is in the public domain.
My colleague Richard Sproat and I recently went through it with “general science” journal editors regarding an overhyped- and undercooked paper about the origins of writing on Easter Island. Language Log has the scoop.
The first ACL Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL) will be held in conjunction with ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada, on July 13th or 14th 2023 (TBD). It will feature invited talks by Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook University) and Amalia Gnanadesikan (University of Maryland, College Park). We welcome submissions of scientific papers to be presented at the conference and archived in the ACL Anthology. Information on submission and format will be posted at https://cawl.wellformedness.com shortly.
Here are slides from a talk, coauthored with Richard Sproat, given at the Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century conference, on how we talk about writing systems in speech and language processing. We will try to get this into archival form soon.
I recently completed some work, in collaboration with Google’s Cyril Allauzen, on a new algorithm for computing the shortest string through weighted finite-state automaton. For so-called path semirings, the shortest string is given by the shortest path, but up until now, there was no general-purpose algorithm for computing the shortest string over non-idempotent semirings (like the log or probability semiring). Such an algorithm would make it much easier to decode with interpolated language models or elaborate channel models in a noisy-channel formalism. In this preprint, we propose such an algorithm using A* search and lazy (“on-the-fly”) determinization, and prove that it is correct. The algorithm in question is implemented in my OpenGrm-BaumWelch library by the baumwelchdecode command-line tool.
I have posted a lightly-revised slide deck from a talk I gave at Johns Hopkins University here. In it, I give my most detailed-yet description of the weighted finite-state transducer formalism and describe two reasonably interesting algorithms, the optimization algorithm underlying Pynini’s optimize method and Thrax’s Optimize function, and a new A*-based single shortest string algorithm for non-idempotent semirings underlying BaumWelch’s baumwelchdecode CLI tool.