30.1534, Rising Stars: Meet Elizabeth Pankratz!
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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1534. Sat Apr 06 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 30.1534, Rising Stars: Meet Elizabeth Pankratz!
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Date: Sat, 06 Apr 2019 22:54:55
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Rising Stars: Meet Elizabeth Pankratz!
Dear Readers,
This year we will be continuing our Rising Stars Series where we feature up
and coming linguists ranging from impactful undergraduates to prolific PhD
candidates. These rising stars have been nominated by their mentors for their
exceptional interest in linguistics and eager participation in the global
community of language researchers.
Selected nominees were asked to share their view of the field of linguistics:
what topics they see emerging as important or especially interesting, what
role they see the field filling in the coming decades, and how they plan to
contribute. We hope you will enjoy the perspectives of these students, who
represent the bright future of our field.
Today we happily present to you the perspective of Elizabeth Pankratz. She is
currently an MA student at Humboldt University, Berlin. She has published a
paper on digital lexicography for endangered languages in Canada, she has work
published in the Journal "Morphology" and she is currently working on a thesis
on the diachronic development of morphological productivity. That's a lot of
achievement! Her excellent track record even allowed her to work at Freie
Universitat, Berlin and the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
(ZAS) simultaneously as a student assistant. Furthermore, her work with the
good people at ZAS lead to another high profile publication in the Journal of
Memory and Language. She has received the highest of praise from her mentors
and probably has a long list of accolades about which we could continue
writing but that might take all day! Without further delay here is her Rising
Star piece...
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I see the field of linguistics becoming increasingly relevant, largely because
of its applicability in modern technology. Our society is constantly
encountering more and more opportunities to converse with machines, and these
machines have to be able to recognise what we're saying and respond in kind.
My current interests lie in how our research into language is applicable in
tech, both in deep learning systems and in language revitalisation work, and
I'll talk about these two points here.
First, for instance, many linguists (myself among them) believe that cognitive
language processing happens probabilistically, and most machine learning
techniques are also based on probabilistic assumptions. But how comparable are
the two sorts of processing? I think that we will be asking ourselves this
more as work on deep learning with language progresses. Can we create machines
that actually have the same intuitions about language that we do? Should we?
If we make machines that can generate language that, to us, sounds just like
language produced by another human, can the way these machines conceptualise
and use language tell us anything about the way that we do?
Making machines that use language in a way that reflects human intuition means
that we need to understand human intuition in the first place, which is where
our work as linguists enters the bigger picture. Discovering and understanding
systematic behaviour of phenomena that look arbitrary or unpredictable at
first glance is naturally valuable for the science of linguistics as a whole,
but I find it so exciting that there are also applications outside of our
immediate field. Some of my research aims to discover this kind of underlying
systematicity. For example, together with Roland Schafer at the Freie
Universitat Berlin, I showed that conceptual plurality in a German compound
word makes the appearance of a linking element with the same form as the
plural suffix of the first noun more likely (e.g. Bild 'picture' in
Bildersammlung 'picture collection' is conceptually plural - you can't have a
collection with only one picture - while Bild in Bildrahmen 'picture frame' is
not, and the pluralic linking element -er- is more probable in the first type
of compound than the second). This finding indicates that German linking
elements do contribute something to the semantics of compounds, which has been
a point of disagreement among morphologists of German. This work has been
published in Morphology as Schafer & Pankratz (2018), a paper I'm incredibly
proud of. We combined the automatic processing of large amounts of data with
linguistic theory-building supporting a probabilistic approach, moving
linguistic methodology forward. Another current project of mine investigates
the conditions under which anaphoric reference to non-head constituents of
compound words in English and German can succeed (like in the sentence "It's
deodorant season, wear it!").
These are tricky and very specific phenomena, like much of what linguists deal
with. However, machine models will only be able to generate, say, fully
natural-sounding compounds in German or correctly resolve non-standard
anaphoric reference if they can deal with these borderline cases. This is why
our research into the fine details of language is incredibly important, not
just for our field but for all fields that build on the study of language. The
modern tech world doesn't just need software developers and engineers, it also
needs linguists.
I'll just briefly touch on the second point about tech in language
revitalisation, since it was also recently discussed on this blog by Nils
Hjortnaes. Developing an understanding of these tricky phenomena in large,
well-researched languages opens methodological doors to pursuing them in
smaller, lower-resource languages, where the importance of high-quality
language resources for teaching and learning is even greater, especially if
the language in question is endangered. Again, we can extend our gaze outside
of the doors of our field and use our knowledge about language to fulfill
social responsibilities, too.
I look forward to being part of this really exciting field for hopefully many
years to come, and I'm grateful for this opportunity to share my thoughts here
with you!
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