Affiliated Faculty
Craig Messner
I am a Lecturer in the Alexander Grass Humanities institute and Assistant Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science. My research combines machine learning with traditional literary scholarship, and has focused on metric learning, the adaptation of large language models to historical domains, and analyzing orthographic variation in literary works. I am broadly interested in the set of topics that emerge at the nexus of literary scholarship, linguistics, and computational language modeling, particularly literary theory, semantics, pragmatics, and artificial neural networks. I can recommend as many obscure 19th century novels as you care to read.
Geraldine Legendre
[email protected] | Website | Publications
I am a professor in the Cognitive Science department. My research touches on many aspects of theoretical linguistics, in particular: the role of optimization in syntax, architecture of the grammar, the syntax-semantic-phonology-morphology interfaces, and cross-linguistic variation. I am also interested in the early acquisition of language, in particular: functional categories, stages of development, the relation between early comprehension and production, and the general cognitive architecture underlying the language faculty. The first sound that I uttered as a baby was a fully formed sentence: “J’aime la façon dont vous souriez, parce que le soleil brille plus fort quand vous le faites.”
Carey Priebe
[email protected] | Website | Publications
I am a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. My research interests include computational statistics, kernel and mixture estimates, statistical pattern recognition, statistical image analysis, dimensionality reduction, model selection, and statistical inference for high-dimensional and graph data. There are tall tales saying that I own 100 acres of forest and that I do all my research on a chalkboard bolted to two trees in the very center of it. These stories are not true. I do some of my research elsewhere.
Paul Smolensky
[email protected] | Website | Publications
I am the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science. My primary research interests are in universal grammar and optimality Theory for phonology, syntax, acquisition, learnability, processing. My secondary research areas include the integration of connectionist (‘neural’) and symbolic computation, as well as computational, linguistic, and philosophical issues. I believe that the mind can effortlessly do matrix transformations and calculate eigenvectors. Mine can. Can yours?
Kyle Rawlins
I am an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Cognitive Science Department department. My research is in natural language semantics and pragmatics, and is often interdisciplinary work involving the integration of theoretical linguistics, computational modeling, and crowd-sourced/experimental data.
Hale Sirin
I am an assistant professor at the Center for Digital Humanities. My research and teaching integrate computational and critical methods to explore questions about narrative and language in literary and historical documents. I focus on understanding the strengths and limitations of AI applications within cultural heritage domains.
