John Hale
Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
and affiliated with the Cognitive Science Program here at MSU
Director, MSU Computational Linguistics Lab
Email: jthale@msu.edu
Office telephone: (517)355-4765
Office: A-621 Wells Hall,
Michigan State University, East Lansing Michigan 48824, USA
Office hours 2007: Thursdays, 2-4pm.
Education
Research Interests
My research is in the area of
computational linguistics
which is part of the larger interdisciplinary enterprise
of cognitive science. The goal of cognitive science is to understand
the mind as a kind of computing machine. Accordingly, the goals of
my research program in computational linguistics
are explanations of the mind's unique language-using abilities
in terms of particular algorithms, data structures
and computer architectures. To arrive at these explanations, I rely
on the formal methods of logic and probability, as well as the
empirical findings of linguistics and psycholinguistics.
My interest in computational linguistics and cognitive science
generally derives from a philosophical interest in timeless questions like
``what is mind?'' and ``what is it to know language?'' that were
dramatically re-posed at the dawn of cognitive science in the 1950s.
However, some aspects of my research may suggest practical benefits
to society in the present through natural language-using computer systems.
Recent papers
- 2006. Uncertainty about the rest of the sentence. Cognitive Science. volume 30, number 4. pages 609-642.
- 2006. PCFGs With Syntactic and Prosodic Indicators of Speech Repairs (with Izhak Shafran, Lisa Yung, Bonnie Dorr, Mary Harper, Anna Krasnyanskaya, Matthew Lease, Yang Liu, Brian Roark, Matthew Snover and Robin Stewart). In Proceedings of COLING/ACL 2006, Sydney Australia.
- 2005. Strict Deterministic Aspects of Minimalist Grammars. (with E. Stabler). in P. Blache, E. Stabler, J. Busquets and R. Moot eds. Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics. Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #3492. pages 162-176.
- 2004. The Information-Processing Difficulty of Incremental Parsing. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop Incremental Parsing: Bringing Engineering and Cognition Together, F. Keller, S. Clark, M. Crocker and M. Steedman, editors. pages 58-65.
- 2004. Promotion of Disfluency in Syntactic Parallelism. (with A. Cooper). Presented at Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium, June 25.
- 2004. Minimal Links, Remnant Movement and (Non-)derivational Grammar (with G. Legendre). In A. Stepanov, G. Fanselow and R.Vogel eds. Minimality Effects in Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pages 177-203.
- 2003. The Information Conveyed by Words in Sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. volume 32, number 2. pages 101-123
- 2001. A Probabilistic Earley Parser as a Psycholinguistic Model. In Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Asssociation for Computational Linguistics.
Teaching
John T. Hale jthale@msu.edu