This year we are welcoming new faculty and students!
Jessica Kantarovich is joining us as an assistant professor. She comes to us from U Chicago. She is a fieldworker working on Arctic languages (Greenlandic, Chukchi). She specializes in morphosyntax and language contact effects, for instance on heritage speakers. Besides her numerous research outputs, Kantarovich has also collaborated with these Indigenous Arctic communities on language preservation and education.
Tomiris Kaumenova graduated from BU with a joint degree in Linguistics and Computer Science and then worked at Converseon, an NLP startup. She has conducted fieldwork on Evenki and Mooré as well as working on Machine Learning analytics. She intends to work with Michael White on developing dialogue systems which can make a positive social impact.
Yi-Chien Lin did an MS in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington, where she worked with Emily Bender on a thesis in the field of grammar engineering, working on how to automatically infer information about how valence-changing verbal morphology is realized in a given language from its interlinear glossed text. She would like to continue to develop computational tools for linguistic analysis and to incorporate linguistic knowledge to improve NLP systems.
Emily Sagasser earned a BA in Linguistics at Ohio State, where she has been working with Robert Levine on a unitary analysis of dummy pronouns. She would like to continue to specialize in syntax with a particular focus on logic-based models of syntax, the syntax-semantics interface, and the relationship between syntactic processing and the realization of syntactic structures.
Chaeli Rule completed a BA in Linguistics and French at the University of Missouri, where she worked with Rebecca Grollemund on a project involving the documentation and description of the Luyia language cluster, along with a number of other issues in Bantu linguistics. As a PhD student, she would like to work on historical linguistics, particularly involving underdocumented or underrepresented languages.
