NECPhon 2017 is a Success!

Local computational phonologists meet at IACS at the 11th annual NECPhon gathering on October 21.

The 11^th annual Northeast Computational Phonology (NECPhon) meeting took place at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) at Stony Brook University this past weekend. Over 30 local phonologists gathered to investigate basic principles and models regarding how sound systems in natural languages are represented, organized, learned, and change over time. This informal gathering was organized by IACS Professor Jeffrey Heinz from the Linguistics Department. “Over the past 11 years, NECPhon has been a great way to encourage linguists to learn about and develop computational methods for understanding the unconscious rules and constraints people use in every language across the world when they talk,” said Heinz.

Examples of some of the topics discussed at the meeting are: syntax in phonology; learning biases in opaque interactions; acoustic categorization of Japanese vowel length; and subsequential steps to unbounded tonal plateauing. Attendees hailed from SBU, University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Maryland, Rutgers, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To learn more about NECPhon, you can visit http://blogs.umass.edu/comphon/meetings/necphon/.