Catherine Lai

I'm a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. You can mainly find me in the phonetics lab where I take advice from Jiahong Yuan and many other people. I'm interested in the phonetics-semantics-pragmatics interface, which really means that I am interested in speech prosody. I hope that looking at the interactions in these areas can provide some bridging between the symbolic and probabilistic aspects of language. More generally, I'm interested in how you can compute these sorts of things. You can find out all about our work in the phonetics lab by coming to splunch, our weekly speech research lunch.

I'm also interested in computational models of language change (see the working paper below). I'm willing to admit that I'm a bit of Bayesian, but if you're going to be a Bayesian you have to think about utility functions. (I know an alarming number of economists)

This year I was co-chair of the 32nd Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Click on the previous link to see the conference program and registration information. Next year's PLC will take place at the end of March and feature Lisa Selkirk as invited speaker - stay tuned!

Not too long ago, I did a research masters at the University of Melbourne, Australia. I was part of the Language Technology Group and my advisor was Steven Bird. Back in the day, I researched querying and manipulating linguistically annotated data. (ie. trees).

Besides this, I am a strong supporter of the work of Amnesty International.

Teaching

LING 001: Introduction to Linguistics [TA: Spring 2008 (Embick/Yang)]

LING 106: Introduction to formal linguistics [TA: Fall 2007 (Nathan)]

LING 521: Phonetics Practicum [TA: Spring 2007 (Yuan)]

LING 520: Introduction to Phonetics [TA: Fall 2006 (Yuan)]

Publications and Presentations

Bayesian Decision Theory, Iterated Learning and Portuguese Clitics

Catherine Lai. Presented at at Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition (Workshop at Cog Sci 2008), Washington D.C, July 2008.

[ slides ] The working paper is below but needs some fixes.

Prosodic Cues for Backchannels and Short Questions: Really?

Catherine Lai. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2008, Campinas, Brazil, May 2008.

[ pdf ] [ slides ] [ extended QP edition ]

Perception of Disfluency: Language Differences and Listener Bias

Catherine Lai, Kyle Gorman, Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman. In Proceedings of Interspeech'07, Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007

[ pdf ] [ poster ]

LPath⁺: A First-Order Complete Language for Linguistic Tree Query

Catherine Lai and Steven Bird. Proceedings of the 19th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC). pp 1-12, Taipei, Taiwan. Taipei: Academia Sinica. December 2005.

[ eprint ]

A Formal Framework for Linguistic Tree Query

Catherine Lai. MSc (Research) Thesis, Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering, University of Melbourne, 2005

[ ps ] [ pdf ] [ slides ]

Querying and Updating Treebanks: A Critical Survey and Requirements Analysis

Catherine Lai and Steven Bird. Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop, December 2004
(If you are interested in this, you are better off looking at my masters thesis...)

[ pdf ] [ unimelb eprints ]

Working Papers and Other Business

Bayesian Iterated Learning and Portuguese Clitics

Catherine Lai. Paper for Ling-575 Mental Lexicon, University of Pennsylvania, 2007 [working!]

[ pdf ]

Links

Photos

Some people say that clicking on the photo above will take you to a slightly less obscure one. Now you know.

email: <laic at babel ling upenn edu>

"Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government"
-- Dennis (Monty Python's Holy Grail)