Laboratory for Language, Computation, and Cognition

Laboratory for Language, Computation, and Cognition (L2C2)

Co-Directors: Mitch Marcus and Charles Yang

We are a group of computational linguistics researchers that seek to blend the boundaries between the science of language and natural language processing. We are convinced that human language follow strong cognitive constraints, some of which are unique to language while others are quite possibly domain general, and that such constraints can fruitfully studied with computational means and shamelessly exploits in engineering applications.

A major focus of our work in the past ten years or so has been language learning. We believe the unique conditions of child language acquisition, an unsupervised learning situation with very modest amount of data, provides important clues on why human languages are the way they are, and how linguistic and cognitive constraints may be integrated into machine learning approaches.

 

Current Members

Ryan Budnick: Language change, computational linguistics

Spencer Caplan: Computational linguistics, language acquisition

Andrea Ceolin: Computational linguistics, historical linguistics

Aletheia Cui: Phonetics, historical linguistics, language acquisition

Ava Irani: Language acquisition, syntax, sign language

Jordan Kodner: Computational linguistics, language acquisition, historical linguistics

Caitlin Richter: Historical linguistics

Hongzhi Xu: Computational linguistics, morphology, Chinese linguistics

Recent Collaborators

Bob Berwick

Noam Chomsky

Marie Coppola

Lila Gleitman

Susan Goldin-Meadow

Julie Anne Legate

Hadas Kress-Gazit

Silvina Montrul

Elissa Newport

David Pesetsky

William Sakas

Kathryn Schuler

John Trueswell

Lyle Ungar

Holly Yanco

Virginia Valian

Alumni

Erwin Chan

Kyle Gorman

Constantine Lignos

Emily Pitler

Jon Stevens

Qiuye (Sophie) Zhao