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Saturday, December 12, 2020

New paper: A Principled Approach to Feature Selection in Models of Sentence Processing

 A Principled Approach to Feature Selection in Models of Sentence Processing

Garrett Smith and Shravan Vasishth

Paper downloadable from: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.12918

Abstract

Among theories of human language comprehension, cue-based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long-distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of identifying (and sometimes misidentifying) a retrieval target in order to establish a dependency between words. However, recent work suggests that general, handpicked retrieval cues like these may not be enough to explain illusions of plausibility (Cunnings & Sturt, 2018), which can arise in sentences like The letter next to the porcelain plate shattered. Capturing such retrieval interference effects requires lexically specific features and retrieval cues, but handpicking the features is hard to do in a principled way and greatly increases modeler degrees of freedom. To remedy this, we use well-established word embedding methods for creating distributed lexical feature representations that encode information relevant for retrieval using distributed retrieval cue vectors. We show that the similarity between the feature and cue vectors (a measure of plausibility) predicts total reading times in Cunnings and Sturt’s eye-tracking data. The features can easily be plugged into existing parsing models (including cue-based retrieval and self-organized parsing), putting very different models on more equal footing and facilitating future quantitative comparisons.

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

How to become a professor in Germany---a unique tutorial

How to become a Professor in Germany (Online-Seminar)

For sign-up details, see here: https://www.dhvseminare.de/index.php?module=010700&event=187&catalog_id=3&category_id=15&language_id=

Live-Online-Seminar

This seminar addresses young scientists who are considering a career as a professor at a German university or are already in the middle of an application process for a professorship in Germany. It will give the participants an overview of the career paths to a professorship, covering the legal requirements, the appointment procedure and the legal status of a professor. 

The seminar also addresses how to approach the search for relevant job advertisements, how to prepare the written application documents and how to make a good impression during the further steps in the selection process.
In the second part of the seminar, the participants will receive an overview of the next steps for the successful candidates. This includes the appointment negotiations with German universities, the legal framework and the strategic preparation for those negotiations.

 
Speaker:

RA Dr. Vanessa Adam, Justitiarin für Hochschul- und Arbeitsrecht im Deutschen Hochschulverband

RA (syn.) Katharina Lemke, Justitiarin für Hochschul- und Arbeitsrecht im Deutschen Hochschulverband


Schedule:

09:00-10:00 Career Paths to a Professorship (Fr. Lemke)

   10:00-10:15 Break

10:15-11:45 Application for a Professorship (Fr. Dr. Adam)

   11:45-12:15 Break

12:15-13:15 Negotiations with the University (Legal Framework) (Fr. Lemke)

  13:15-13:30 Break

13:30-14:30 Negotiations with the University (Strategy) (Fr. Dr. Adam)


Included in the price:

Seminar documents in electronic form (via download).