New faculty join SB Linguistics: Jordan Kodner, Tatiana Luchkina, Owen Rambow
Dr. Jordan Kodner joins the department in Fall 2020 as Assistant Professor. His research takes a computational
approach to language acquisition, acquisition's impact on language variation and change,
and its relationship to low-resource natural language processing, with an interest
in how small, variable, and unreliable input affect the morphological, syntactic,
and phonological learning. His acquisition work has touched on several aeras and varieties
of English, and on Latin, Spanish, and Korean, among others, and his work in low-resource
NLP aims to include a wide range of world languages, both well-studied and underserved.
He received his MSE in Computer and Information Science and PhD in Linguistics from
the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Tatiana Luchkina joins the department in Fall 2020 as Visiting Assistant Professor. Her research investigates
various aspects of prosodic expression in read and conversational speech, how it interacts
with other properties of discourse, such as word order and information status, and
how it affects comprehension and subsequent information recall. She is also interested
in how prosodic patterns vary cross-linguistically and among speakers of the same
language. Her other interests are in the areas of second language acquisition and
TESOL, proficiency assessment, and multilingual development. She received her Ph.D.
in Linguistics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Owen Rambow is going to join the department in Spring 2021 as Professor and Endowed Chair in
Linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS). His research
focuses on natural language processing and computational linguistics. Specific interests
include both the “nuts and bolts” of language, such as morphology and syntax, and
how language is actually used in context. Dr. Rambow received a Ph.D. in Computer
and Information Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania, and he has worked at
AT&T Labs — Research, 15 years at Columbia University as a research scientist, and
three years at Elemental Cognition LLC, a startup aiming to develop software for deep
language understanding. At Columbia, he was part of the Center for Computational Learning
Systems. He was co-founder of CADIM, a research group on Arabic natural language processing
(NLP), which is licensing state-of-the-art robust NLP tools. His group also released
several resources, including a richly annotated version of the Enron email corpus. He
has published extensively in top conferences and journals. He has served as the Chair
of the American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, as program
co-chair of the NAACL HLT 2016 conference, and he has served as program committee
chair or senior program committee member for many conferences and workshops.