John Hale

Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
Cornell University
email: jthale "at" name-of-school "dot" eduoffice: Morrill Hall room 217
office phone: 607-255-0733
office hours for Fall 2009: Tuesday afternoons 3-5pm or by appointment

Education

PhD., 2003: Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University (dissertation, abstract)
M.A., 2000: Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University (thesis)
ScB., 1998: Cognitive Science and Computer Science (with honors), Brown University (thesis)

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.

I am looking for outstanding students with overlapping interests in language, cognition and computation.

Selected Papers

2008. Parsing costs as predictors of reading difﬁculty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus (with Marisa F. Boston, Shravan Vasishth, Umesh Patil and Reinhold Kliegl). Journal of Eye Movement Research volume 2 number 1 pages 1-12.
2007. Deforesting LF. To appear in UCLA Working Papers volume collecting the Proceedings of Mathematics of Language 10.
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 Edward P. Stabler, Jr). 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. Minimal Links, Remnant Movement and (Non-)derivational Grammar (with Géraldine 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.

Recent Teaching

Fall 2009	Computational Linguistics
Spring 2009	Introduction to Linguistics
	Computational Psycholinguistics
Fall 2008	Computational Linguistics
Spring 2008	Statistics and Linguistic Applications
	Cognitive Science Seminar
Fall 2007	Introduction to Linguistics
	Introduction to Computational Linguistics
Spring 2007	Introduction to Cognitive Science
	Computational Psycholinguistics

Recent Presentations

Edinburgh/Saarbrücken IRTG Summer School 2008: Automaton theories of human sentence comprehension
AMLaP 2007: A general, phrase-structured account of local coherences

Software

The CYK parser for Minimalist Grammars described in Appendix A of my dissertation implements a design presented in Henk Harkema's 2001 UCLA dissertation. The implementation also calculates the entropy of the suffix language that grammatically completes a given prefix string, under a context-free probability model of MG derivations.

John Hale