At this week’s MCQLL meeting (Wednesday, November 4th, 1:30-2:30pm), Emi Baylor, masters student at McGill School of Computer Science and Mila, will be presenting on her work with morphological productivity. Bio and talk abstract are below.
If you would like to attend the talk but are not already on the MCQLL listserv, please sign up at this link as soon as possible, as there is still a registration step that needs to be completed after that.
Bio: Emi Baylor is a masters student at McGill Computer Science and Mila. She is interested in computational morphology, multilingual NLP, and low resource languages, as well as the combination of all three.
Abstract: This work investigates and empirically tests theories of linguistic productivity. Language users are able to make infinite use of finite means, meaning that a finite number of words and morphemes can be used to create an infinite number of utterances. This is largely due to linguistic productivity, which allows language users to create and understand novel expressions through stored, reusable units. One example of a productive process across language is plural morphology, which generalizes the use of plural morphemes in a language to novel words. This work investigates and empirically tests theories of how this generalization of forms is learned and carried out, through data from the complex German plural noun system.