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)
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.
Publications and Presentations
Catherine Lai.
Proceedings of Interspeech'09, Brighton, UK, Sept 2009.
Catherine Lai and Steven Bird.
To appear, Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 18, 2009
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.
Catherine Lai.
In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2008, Campinas, Brazil, May 2008.
Catherine Lai, Kyle Gorman, Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman.
In Proceedings of Interspeech'07, Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007
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 ]
Catherine Lai.
MSc (Research) Thesis,
Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering,
University of Melbourne, 2005
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...)
Working Papers and Other Business
Catherine Lai.
Dissertation Proposal, Nov 2009
[comments welcome!]
Bayesian Iterated Learning and Portuguese Clitics
Catherine Lai.
Paper for Ling-575 Mental Lexicon, University of Pennsylvania, 2007
[working!]
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)]
I've also taught recitations and labs at the University of Melbourne, including
Introduction to Programming, and Logic and Computation.
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)