Linguistics Faculty Receive NSF Grant in Computational Phonology

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Joe Pater, professor and chair of the linguistics department (ranked No. 2 among linguistics departments worldwide), and Gaja Jarosz, associate professor of linguistics, have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant on “Representing and learning stress: Grammatical constraints and neural networks” in the amount of $386,226. This three-year research grant will study the learnability of a wide range of word stress patterns, using two general approaches. The goal of the project will be to develop grammar and learning systems that can cope with a broader range of typological data than current models, and that can handle more details of individual languages. 

According to the project summary, "learning stress involves learning hidden structure, parts of the representation [of language] that are not present in the observed data and that must be inferred by the learner." The research will draw on the theories and methods of both linguistics and computer science to study the learning of word stress, the pattern of relative prominence of the syllables in a word by applying learning methods from computer science to find new evidence to distinguish competing linguistic theories. It will also examine systems of language representation that have been developed in computer science and have received relatively little attention by linguists (neural networks).

The research will engage both undergraduate and graduate linguistics students at UMass Amherst. In addition, the project summary notes that "linguistics has a much higher proportion of female students than computer science, and this project aims to address gender imbalance in STEM." 

Pater has served as Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI on four NSF grants to date. At the conclusion of this grant, his research will have received about nearly two decades of continuous funding, with a total of $1,428,866.00.