Tim Hunter

Linguist at UCLA

[Tim Hunter @TimTheLinguist]

If you're going to UMass for the LSA summer institute, consider coming a few days early for the SCiL conference (June 15-17):
https://t.co/0UJzGhGZO0
@lingstitute2023 #LSAInstitute2023

[Tal Linzen @tallinzen]

The program for the Society for Computation in Linguistics (June 15-17) is available: https://t.co/Xx6IMMn7AW

Lots of cool-looking stuff, thanks @Joe_Pater, @TimTheLinguist and @bpricket for organizing!

[The Onion @TheOnion]

HelloFresh Announces Collaboration To Discreetly Deliver McDonald’s In Its Packaging https://t.co/wvv3SDOMGG

[Tim Hunter @TimTheLinguist]

@EvelinaLeivada @tscottphillips @JWGrieve Yes I assume that's roughly what it means to "work in ordinary communication". But I don't know whether that actually happens with the Russia sentences. The usual observations about the Russia sentences (which lead us to call them acceptable) don't seem to bear on this question.

[Tim Hunter @TimTheLinguist]

@tscottphillips @JWGrieve @EvelinaLeivada But what's odd about the Russia sentence (as Colin Phillips points out on the LL page) is that people find it acceptable *without* being able to give it an interpretation. When a resumptive pronoun like Fry's is acceptable, it seems to have a systematic interpretation (as a gap).

[Chung-chieh Shan 單中杰 @ccshan]

Probabilistic Exact Recursive Programming Language
https://t.co/LeUa4xCuRX

[Tim Hunter @TimTheLinguist]

@tscottphillips @JWGrieve @EvelinaLeivada But does something like the Russia sentence really "work in ordinary communication"? I agree with the logic of calling it acceptable, for the usual reasons, but I think that leaves room for the possibility that it basically never occurs.

[LINGUIST List @linguistlist]

Jobs: Assistant or Associate Professor of Syntax, University of California, Los Angeles: The UCLA Department of Linguistics seeks to fill a faculty position (tenured or tenure-track), starting July 1, 2023, for a specialist in contemporary formal… https://t.co/3WrtyDKkGC

[Freethink @freethinkmedia]

"Cynicism has become a hollow shorthand for intelligence. Afraid of being labeled naive, too often our discourse is characterized by hostile, knee-jerk skepticism that doesn’t allow much room for doubt or wonder." - @brandon_stewart for The Progress Issue

[Tim Hunter @TimTheLinguist]

Norbert in fine form: "Chomsky’s point is that sometimes nothing actually is better than something, since postulated somethings that don’t do any explanatory work actually blind us to our ignorance"

[David Poeppel @davidpoeppel]

Helpful clarification of some philosophy
https://t.co/DLneK1t7Ke

[Associate Deans @ass_deans]

Please see our RFP, we are looking for a search firm to hire a new executive vice-provost for vice-provost recruitment.

[The Onion @TheOnion]

Family With 2-Hour Layover Sets Up Rough Shantytown At Airport Gate https://t.co/KX0a2QIllL

[Tim Hunter @TimTheLinguist]

Given a weighted CFG, is there a way to sample from the globally-normalized distribution over derivations (where a tree's prob is proportional to its score), *without* first converting to the locally-normalized version of the grammar?

[Human Progress @HumanProgress]

Over the last few decades, life expectancy has risen across all country income levels.

Importantly, the gap between the richest and poorest places is narrowing.

Explore the data: https://t.co/SqDQTkxiA5

[Tim Hunter @TimTheLinguist]

@pictureofitself @alexandersclark @Benambridge The former apparently almost always come to the additional conclusion that this terminology *is* helpful (i.e. they adopt it). Is there anyone who thinks movement *might* be a useful model, but just happens to not be because of the way the facts are?

[Tim Hunter @TimTheLinguist]

@pictureofitself @alexandersclark @Benambridge This seems to me to be largely a debate between people who are happy to entertain the possibility that the movement/EC terminology *might* be a helpful way to frame a theory, and people who aren't.

[Human Progress @HumanProgress]

In Africa, "healthy life expectancy—or the number of years an individual is in a good state of health—increased to 56 years in 2019, compared with 46 in 2000."
https://t.co/g8XWBtTdfl

[Lev Reyzin @lreyzin]

This is what Dana Angluin would tell her students at the beginning of her discrete math class at Yale, which I TAed back in grad school.

It was always quite a shocking thing for them to hear when they had just been taught the opposite in high school!

[Tim Hunter @TimTheLinguist]

We know that for any NFA with n states, there is an equivalent DFA with at most 2^n states. Question: if I have a DFA with 2^n states, under what conditions is there an equivalent NFA with exactly n states? I've been poking around but cannot seem to find anything about this.