Participation of Research Students from the Department in a Research Workshop
At MIT
Research students Orr Well, Imry Ziv, Saar Yahalom, Eyal Marco, Matan Abudy and Ben Flickstein participated in a week-long workshop on "Abstractness in Phonology" at the MIT Department of Linguistics. The workshop focused on questions of representation and learning in phonology, and marked the second meeting of a collaborative project led by Dr. Ezer Rasin and Prof. Roni Katzir from Tel Aviv University, along with Prof. Donca Steriade and Prof. Adam Albright from MIT, funded by the MISTI Foundation.
Orr Well, Imry Ziv and Matan Abudy presented their research on neural networks at the MIT Computational Psycholinguistics Lab.
Ben Flickstein presented his joint research with Dr. Ezer Rasin on birdsong at the MIT Department of Linguistics Phonology Circle:
Towards a phonological feature system for birdsong
Abstract:
A foundational assumption in theoretical phonology is that phonological representations are built from distinctive features, typically stated in articulatory terms. Those features define natural classes that phonological processes typically apply to or are conditioned by. Even though birdsong shares important properties with human phonology, the dominant approach in birdsong research has not yet explored the possibility that the sound patterns of birdsong could be tied to cognitive, articulatory-oriented features. This presentation of an ongoing research project reports on a preliminary attempt to create such a feature system for the song of canaries.
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