Welcome to the home page of the UCSD computational psycholinguistics lab! We study human language comprehension, production, acquisition, and representation through a combination of computational modeling and experimental psycholinguistics. Our extramural funding sources include the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

News

4 November 2011... The lab now has a Twitter feed, announcing upcoming papers, talks, and event. Follow us!

9 June 2011... Klinton Bicknell has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation!

1 April 2011...Our lab will have three papers at the 2011 Cognitive Science Conference in Boston:

  • Why readers regress to previous words: A statistical analysis by Klinton Bicknell and Roger Levy
  • Cloze but no cigar: The complex relationship between cloze, corpus, and subjective probabilities in language processing by Nathaniel J. Smith and Roger Levy
  • Phonological generalization from distributional evidence by Bozena Pajak and Roger Levy

2 March 2011...Mark Myslín has been awarded a 2011-2012 Jacob K. Javits Fellowship! Congratulations Mark!

11 February 2011...Our lab will have two papers at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL):

  • Integrating surprisal and uncertain-input models in online sentence comprehension: formal techniques and empirical results by Roger Levy
  • Automated Whole Sentence Grammar Correction Using a Noisy Channel Model by Y. Albert Park and Roger Levy

24 January 2011...Our lab will have six poster presentations at this year's CUNY Sentence Processing Conference:

  • Comparing cloze versus corpus probabilities in self-paced reading by Nathaniel Smith and Roger Levy
  • Between-word regressions from words of low predictability and frequency by Klinton Bicknell and Roger Levy
  • Explaining the Relative Clause Asymmetry by Vera Demberg, Frank Keller, and Roger Levy
  • Word Re-recognition Occurs During Second Pass Reading: Evidence from Eye-movements by Emily Morgan, Roger Levy, Klinton Bicknell, Timothy Slattery and Keith Rayner
  • Word-Form Typicality Effects on Eye-Movements During Reading by Thomas Farmer, Suzanne Dikker, Klinton Bicknell, Alex Fine and Michael Tanenhaus
  • Discourse incongruence facilitates memory retrieval during sentence comprehension by Philip Hofmeister and Klinton Bicknell

16 December 2010...Roger Levy and Keith Rayner have been awarded a five-year R01 research grant from the NIH (NICHD) on Linguistic Processes in Sentence Comprehension and Reading.

30 October 2010...Gabriel Doyle is one of the student authors on the Best Student Paper award-winning paper at the 2010 ACM Multimedia conference: A New Approach to Cross-Modal Multimedia Retrieval, by Nikhil Rasiwasia, Jose Costa Pereira, Emanuele Coviello, Gabriel Doyle, Gert R.G. Lanckriet, Roger Levy, and Nuno Vasconcelos.

23 April 2010...Roger Levy has been awarded a five-year NSF CAREER award for research on Rational Language Processing with Noisy and Uncertain Input.

20 April 2010...Klinton Bicknell and Roger Levy will have a paper at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) entitled A Rational Model of Eye Movement Control in Reading.

12 April 2010...Our lab will have four papers at the 2010 Cognitive Science Conference: oral presentations by Klinton Bicknell and Roger Levy entitled Rational eye movements in reading combining uncertainty about previous words with contextual probability and by Nathaniel J. Smith and Roger Levy entitled Fixation durations in first-pass reading reflect uncertainty about word identity, and poster presentations by Nathaniel J. Smith, Wen-Hsuan Chan, and Roger Levy entitled Is perceptual acuity asymmetric in isolated word recognition? Evidence from an ideal-observer reverse-engineering approach and by Emily Morgan, Frank Keller, and Mark Steedman entitled A bottom-up parsing model of local coherence effects .

10 December 2009...Rebecca Colavin will present a paper Modeling OCP-Place with the Maximum Entropy Phonotactic Learner (coauthored with Roger Levy and Sharon Rose) at the Computational Modelling of Sound Pattern Acquisition Workshop at the University of Alberta on 13-14 February 2009.

20 October 2009...Our paper Eye movement evidence that readers maintain and act on uncertainty about past linguistic input has been accepted for publication in the Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

23 September 2009...Our lab will have two talks at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (January 7-10):

  • Klinton Bicknell and Roger Levy. Eye movements in reading as optimal responses to the contextualized structure of language.
  • Roger Levy. On hallucinated garden paths.

20 Apr 2009...Two members of our lab -- Rebecca Colavin and Nathaniel Smith -- have been awarded CRL Predoctoral Training Fellowships! These are funded by the NIDCD as part of the Center for Research in Language's Training Grant on "Language, Communication, and the Brain".

10 Apr 2009...Gabriel Doyle and Charles Elkan will have a talk at the 2009 International Conference on Machine Learning (June 14-18, 2009) on Accounting for Burstiness in Topic Models.

30 Mar 2009...Our lab will have two talks at this year's Cognitive Science Conference in Amsterdam:

  • Klinton Bicknell and Hannah Rohde. Effects of Discourse Relations and Real-World Event Knowledge on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution.
  • Roger Levy. Particle filters and online sentence parsing. (Part of a symposium on Rational Process Models)

28 Jan 2009...Our lab has four presentations in this year's CUNY sentence processing conference:

  • Klinton Bicknell and Roger Levy. A new model of local coherences as resulting from Bayesian belief update (poster presentation).
  • Roger Levy, Klinton Bicknell, Tim Slattery, and Keith Rayner. Readers maintain and act on uncertainty about past linguistic input: Evidence from eye movements (oral presentation).
  • Roger Levy, Florencia Reali, and Thomas Griffiths. Digging-in effects as rational limited-parallel sentence comprehension (poster presentation).
  • Harry Tily, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, and Roger Levy. Comprehension difficulty reflects an understanding of likely production errors (poster presentation).

20 Jan 2009...Our lab will have two papers in this year's NAACL:

  • Klinton Bicknell and Roger Levy. A model of local coherence effects in human sentence processing as consequences of updates from bottom-up prior to posterior beliefs. To appear in Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics -- Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT) conference.
  • Y. Albert Park and Roger Levy. Minimal-length linearizations for mildly context-sensitive dependency trees. To appear in Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics -- Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT) conference.

19 Dec 2008...Klinton Bicknell, Vera Demberg and Roger Levy have a paper accepted to the 35th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (February 14-16, 2009) on Correcting the incorrect: Local coherence effects modeled with prior belief update.