Posting an introduction template (/suggested questions) for the Hackathon that we, the organisers, can use for team-forming ahead of time.
Most important: So we can balance expertise in teams, which category would you place yourself in 1) linguist, 2) software developer, or 3) both/flexible?
Plus some icebreaker questions from our main thread (feel free to have a look there for who’s already on this forum!):
What are your interests?
What language(s) do you work with?
Are there any aspects of your work that you’re dying to share?
Any aspects of your work that are driving you crazy?
I am Yolanda Xavier, a PhD candidate in Psycholinguistics from NOVA University Lisbon (Portugal). I am primarily a linguist, though I am familiar with R, Julia, and Python.
I am interested in Phonetics, Phonology, Psycholinguistics, and Sociolinguistics. My research explores the language attitudes of L1 European Portuguese speakers towards the L2 speakers. In light of this, the main languages I work with are European Portuguese and Ukrainian.
I am afraid that at this stage there are no specific aspects of my work that I am eager to share with the wider public, though I will definitely share more information when the right time will come . Same about the aspects of my work that are driving me crazy .
Fun facts: I am a fitness enthusiast, obsessed with bodybuilding and powerlifting.
I’m Irina Burukina, an assistant professor at the UF. I’m a linguist mostly interested in language documentation and creating annotated corpora, and I’ve been working on Mayan languages (spoken in Guatemala) and Uralic languages (mostly those spoken in Russia). I started as a computational linguist and used to be able to code, but those skills are rather rusty now.
My name is Brooklyn, I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Calgary (Canada). I consider myself primarily a linguist with a lot of computational experience (e.g., worked as an NLP scientist for a couple years before starting my PhD, recently did a research internship with Meta). I’m comfortable programming in R and Python, and running this code on a compute cluster using Bash scripts.
From my varied background, I’m interested in applying computational methods to studying how individuals perceive speech, particularly things like intonation and rhythm in English. My PhD research is focused on building cognitively inspired computational models of this perception and comparing the results to identical behavioural tasks with human listeners.
I’ve studied a few different languages including Czech and Kinyarwanda, but am a big fan of exposing myself to as many languages as possible!
One thing that always drives me crazy in studying intonation is the best way to mathematically model the pitch or loudness of a speaker through time - do we model it at the word-level? Syllable level? Phrase level? How might this differ by language (e.g., tone languages)? Not to mention, what mathematical functions are ideal for this task that are also interpretable to linguists? I have lots of ideas to answer these questions, but none that completely satisfies me yet!
My name is Raza from Germany.
I have backgroung in Computational Linguistics and Software development.
I can speak English, Urdu, Punjabi and basic German.
I have worked on NLP pipelines, transformers, …
I have interests in bayesian neural networks and bayesian appraoches to ML in general.
Hi, my name is Tetiana Ilman. My background is in Philology - Ukrainian/Russian. I also speak Polish. My journey began long ago with psycholinguistic research exploring how Ukrainian and English shape different worldviews. Now I’m working on a project that aims to map, annotate, and preserve language ontologies. I entered my kind of “technical education” with Google AI certificates, then Computational Linguistics Summer School. I have very basic Python skills - dealing simple data-scraping tasks. I look forward to Hackaton and getting deeper into the topic.
Hello everyone,
My name is Minh-Châu. I am Vietnamese. I obtained my PhD in 2021 on the tonal system of Kim Thuong Muong, a minority language in Vietnam. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at GIPSA-lab in Grenoble, France, as part of an ANR project on the interaction between tone, intonation, and glottalization. My research interests include empirical phonetics and phonology, fieldwork, tone and intonation, open science, and, more recently, computational linguistics for language documentation. I am learning a little Matlab, a little R, and a little Python. So I am a novice in computer science, but eager to learn.
I may have similar interests to Brooklyn in terms of studying intonation and tone, but from a more linguistic perspective. I have not yet found a good methodology to identify and categorize intonation as an independent component of language, which I think it should be, nor how to conduct a reliable experiment on the production and perception of intonation, and so on.
Have a nice week and looking forward to seeing you guys this weekend.
Hi Brooklyn,
I love your questions! Several of my colleagues work on tonal African languages and they have similar or overlapping questions. You should talk with @gagyapon about modeling and recognizing pitch and tone.
Hi all, I am Carrie Gillon, a linguist working for the Squamish Nation. I am a linguist only, though I have dabbled a little bit with R and Python. My interests as an academic were semantics, syntax and morphology - I have a book on Squamish determiners (based on my dissertation) and a co-authored book on Michif noun phrases.
Fun fact: I’m also a podcaster (Vocal Fries), which is about linguistic discrimination. (Always looking for guests, btw, if you have something to talk about in that vein.)
But the reason I’m interested in this hackathon is I’m working on recreating the dictionary database (which was in Shoebox, but destroyed in an IT update awhile back) for Squamish so we can publish an updated version. I’m curious about possibilities.
My name is Aydariya, and I’m a student at New York University in Abu Dhabi.
I’d place myself more in the linguist category, though I have some programming experience as well. My main focus is psycholinguistics, especially at the intersection of neuroscience and linguistics. I’ve taken a semester of Python, and I’m familiar with R and MATLAB, particularly with EEGLAB for EEG data analysis.
I’m especially interested in the neuroscience of language, including bilingualism/multilingualism and language acquisition. I assist in a lab where we use EEG to study language-related processes and explore the science behind it.
Currently, I’m doing an independent research project on bilingualism and language contact in Central Asia, focusing on how Kazakh speakers in Uzbekistan borrow from Uzbek and the cognitive mechanisms behind that. I love that this project brings together so many areas of linguistics, from documentation and sociolinguistics to language technology and psycholinguistics.
My name is Summer and I’m a PhD student in linguistics at George Mason University in Virginia. I have master’s degrees in both linguistics and data science, so I consider myself a bit of a programmer, but software developers will know that data scientists are not THAT good at programming; we just know how to use Python and prompt LLMs.
I am interested in language documentation and especially revitalization with the assistance of computational tools. In addition to using LLMs and performing classic NLP tasks, I work with ASR models for endangered and low-resource languages. I’m currently working with a community on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska on revitalization of their language (Akuzipik). Akuzipik is an indigenous polysynthetic language (of which there are many in the Americas), and I’ve recently learned it had a variety of whistled speech up until the last decade or so. Please ask me about it if you would like to nerd out together.
Fun fact: I’m a musician/singer/songwriter in the DC area
I’m Phakphum Artkaew, currently a first-year PhD student in computational linguistics at Indiana University. I go by Peter (or Pluem when back home in Thailand).
I would consider myself to be more of a software developer at this point. I have my background in computer science and computer engineering, but right now I’m learning all sorts of linguistics. My interests lie in low-resource language modeling (how to make language models learn from less data) and commonsense reasoning (how to evaluate and improve reasoning in language models). I’m Thai, so I’ve worked with Thai before and hope to continue working on Thai and other Southeast Asian languages.
I think something about my work that’s driving me crazy is that the language model or AI field is really fast-paced, and it’s really hard to keep up with the field (new papers coming out every day). But I love reading new papers!
Fun facts about me: I enjoy cooking food and experimenting with all sorts of recipes.
i’m brandon, i just finished my master’s in linguistics at mcgill university (montreal) where i also received a bachelor’s in computer science. thus for teams i am very flexible with focusing more on either linguistics or software development.
my research lies in morphology at the intersection of formal syntax and semantics. i’m part of the Montreal Underdocumented Languages Linguistics Lab (MULL Lab) and am mostly interested in Niger-Congo languages, with data primarily collected through fieldwork in: Igala (Volta-Niger; Nigeria), Wolof (Atlantic; Senegal), and Kirundi (Bantu; Burundi), but i have worked on Na-Dene and Mayan languages as well.
my main motivation for participating is due to my frustration with not being able to efficiently collaborate with fieldwork data. i’ve used ELAN but not FLEx, i’ve used Dative instead but it’s servers are always down (i was even contributing to an updated version myself but funding was cut). i would like to be able to have a collaborative database (online and asynchronous) with other members of my lab (many other students in my lab use excel, which is very inefficient).
edit: i have built a very minimalIGT-to-LaTeX converter for myself and think having a standardized IGT format would be perfect to make it more functional.
So we can balance expertise in teams, which category would you place yourself in 1) linguist, 2) software developer, or 3) both/flexible?
Hi, I’m Dan, and I’m a PhD student in computer science at Georgetown. I previously completed my MS in computational linguistics also at Georgetown, so I would say I am in the “both/flexible” category.
What are your interests?
Many, but the most relevant ones here are low-resource NLP and speech processing, as well as historical linguistics.
What language(s) do you work with?
There isn’t any language I work on on a regular basis. I’m excited to work on any language I can!
Are there any aspects of your work that you’re dying to share?
I like to diversify the sorts of projects I work on. In addition to some projects dealing with speech recognition and language modeling and their applications, I also work in computer vision, and am beginning to dip my toe into physics again, after having studied it as an undergrad.
Any aspects of your work that are driving you crazy?
Most! The worst is when your research takes you in a direction that requires you to build a tool for some purpose. It might be a necessary diversion to complete the work, but time-consuming nonetheless.
Any fun facts about yourself?
I play several musical instruments and like to compose music occasionally.
My name is Sofia and I am half Danish and half Italian. I am currently pursuing my Master’s in Applied Linguistics at Montclair State University in New Jersey and work as a graduate assistant at the Center for Writing Excellence. My background is in Education, and I taught for three years in an International school in Copenhagen, Denmark. There, I was teaching Danish as a second language and English to elementary students. I was also apart of a non-profit Saturday school where I taught Italian to Italian children living in Copenhagen.
I am very interested in bilingualism, translanguaging, code-switching, language learning and language acquisition.
Currently, I am not doing any research, but I would love to research more on translanguaging and bilingualism, especially focusing on bilingual schools.
Fun fact: I have been to 48 states and 29 countries!!
I’m Elena Lazarenko, a research assistant at the University of Hamburg. I have a linguistic background and currently am a member of the INEL project specializing in corpus curation and workflow development for endangered Northern Eurasian lanaguages. I’m also pursuing a PhD in acoustic phonetics focusing on phonetic interference among Enets-Russian and Nganasan-Russian bilingual speakers.
I think I could put myself into the “flexible” category, yet leaning to the linguistic side: I do not-so-rarely code a little as a part of my job (atm mostly some rather basic JavaScript and Python with some Java and bash scripting here and there), however, I would feel way more confident paired with a more advanced developer when taking on a big project.
The INEL team ongoingly develops a few tools that are aimed to improve the quality of the corpora we build. The most recent of them is the IGT importer to FLEx that keeps the morpheme glosses intact (GitHub - git-debase-verbose/FWdata-Import). For now, it has been tested on the in-project data only, but we would love to make it more approachable by the broader audience, as it seems to be a hot topic for the FLEx users So I’m very excited to attend this hackathon today!
A very linguistically unrelevant fun fact: I am a big fan of (niche) perfumery and can talk about it for hours
Hi, everyone. I’m Joshua McNeill, a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of Georgia. I work in sociolinguistics, specifically language variation and race in Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole. I’m a linguist first and foremost but I’m comfortable in R, somewhat experienced in Python, and familiar with a range of other programming languages, especially markup languages like LaTeX.
My name is Meg Harvey, I’m a linguist focusing mostly on documentation and revitalization. I work with Uspanteko (a Mayan language), Tunica (a reawakening isolate in Louisiana), Hiaki/Yaqui (Uto-Aztecan) and Virginia Algionquian (A reawakening Algonquian language). I am especially interested in looking at documentation of languages as they reawaken, as both a snapshot of language change at a specific point in time and as a way to support learners with limited opportunities to be exposed to the language.
For thorny problems, its definitely the challenge of balancing keeping data under the control of the communities with whom I work while also having dictionaries/copora/etc that are easy to access.
The only thing I’ve coded much of is choose your own adventure games in Twine and Javascript haha, so I’m definitely on the “linguist” side of things.
Fun fact: I love cats and tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons
Hi everyone! I’m Kseniya Karasjova, now pursuing a masters degree in cognitive systems in the University of Potsdam. My bachelor degree is in linguistics (Chinese and English), but now I’m focusing more on computational linguistics and NLP. I have some programming skills, mainly Python and SQL. Now also working in ZAS Berlin as a research assistant, main tasks are related to data management.
Hi Carrie,
We may not have a team working on a specific project like that. But these are the sort of issues a lot of us are interested in. I have linguistics students looking for projects to practice coding skills so I’d love to learn more about your project.
. Same about the aspects of my work that are driving me crazy 
.
So I’m very excited to attend this hackathon today!