Undergraduate Research: Cross-Lingual Approaches to Morphosyntactic Tagging

Montclair State University, Montclair NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The main goal of this project is to build a team of undergraduate students in Linguistics and Computer Science to work on the research project collaboratively. Through this experience, the students will be able to learn about each other's disciplines, linguistic properties of many interesting languages, tagset design, various supervised/unsupervised approaches to morphosyntactic tagging as well as acquire mathematical modeling and algorithmic skills -- all while working as part of the research team. In this research, the PI together with her students will explore how cross-lingual correspondences can be used for scientific and technological benefit, and provide a better understanding of what linguistic properties are crucial for morphosyntactic transfer. This award will play a central role in expanding inquiry-based learning, fostering student collaborations, and providing valuable hands-on experience of highly practical work on difficult, morphologically rich under-represented languages. The impact of this project is expected to translate into significant gains in recruitment of minority students through research training in Computer Science and Linguistics. The undergraduates who work on this project will collaborate on the writing of research publications and present at national meetings so that they can contribute to the research culture while enhancing their research awareness.