JORDAN KODNER COMPUTATIONAL LINGUIST at STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY

email: jordan.kodner at-sign stonybrook edu
office: Dept. of Linguistics, Social & Behavioral Sciences Building (SBS), Floor 2

• Fall 2024 Information
• About Me
• Journal Articles
• Proceedings
• Other Manuscripts
• Presentations

I am an assistant professor in the Stony Brook University Department of Linguistics, affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Department of Computer Science, Institute for AI-Driven Discovery and Innovation, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) group. My primary research revolves around computational approaches to child language acquisition and their broader implications. In particular,

• Algorithmic models of grammar acquisition, especially morphology
• How those processes drive language variation and change
• What insights they provide for low-resource NLP
• What they can tell us about the the intersection of (low-resource) NLP and cognitive science

I am writing a book titled Child Language Acquisition in the Past: A Mechanistic View of Language Change for Edinburgh University Press. It investigates the role that child language acquisition plays in language change. The broad goal is to build a general understanding of language change grounded in an understanding of its mechanisms. Enabled by algorithmic modeling and corpus methods, I draw insights from traditional historical linguistics, the cognitive science of language acquistion, and findings in variationist sociolinguistics.

My other academic interests, a few of which have intersected my research so far, include (alphabetically): Chinese language varieties, computing history, evolutionary theory, formal language theory, general NLP, human geography, Indo-European historical linguistics, Latin language, paleontology and cladistics, Roman history and culture, Semitic languages, Shona language, Singlish and Singaporean English, software engineering, and writing systems.

In 2020, I received my PhD (my dissertation) from the University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics, where I worked with Charles Yang and Mitch Marcus. I received a master's degree from the University of Pennsylania Department of Computer and Information Science in 2018. From 2013 through 2015, I was an Associate Scientist in the Speech, Language, and Multimedia group at Raytheon BBN Technologies where I worked on defense and medical-related projects. I interned with Amazon Alexa AI-Natural Language Understanding in summer 2020.

• Héctor J. Vázquez Martínez, Annika Heuser, Charles Yang, Jordan Kodner. (forthcoming). Evaluating the Existence Proof: LLMs as Cognitive Models of Language Acquisition. In In Artificial Knowledge of Language.
• Jordan Kodner, Sarah Payne, Jeff Heinz. (2023). Why Linguistics Will Thrive in the 21st Century: A Reply to Piantadosi (2023).

LIN 260: Language and Mind Monday/Wednesday 9:30-10:50am.

The official description:
An introduction to the study of the human mind, starting with modern scientific investigations of language, and then its relationship with other systems such as music perception, visual narrative, numerical cognition as well as comparison to animal cognition. What is innate and what does "innateness" mean? Do the brain mechanisms subserving language also support musical and numerical cognition? How is language related to thought and to action? Students will be exposed to research across several disciplines (linguistics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience) and will acquire a basic understanding of modern experimental tools for investigating the human mind.

SBCs: SBS, SNW

LIN 537: Computational Linguistics I Monday/Wednesday 3:30-4:50am.

The official description:
A hands-on introduction to practical aspects of computational linguistics. Students learn how to perform common tasks such as tagging and tokenization with a state-of-the-art programming language. Topics include basic data structures and algorithms, n-gram models, regular expressions, and corpus linguistics.

Office Hours

• Special LIN 260 Office Hours: Wednesday 11:00am-12:00pm
• General Office Hours: Tuesday 10:00-11:30am, Thursday 01:00-2:30pm

• Héctor J. Vázquez Martínez, Annika Heuser, Charles Yang, Jordan Kodner. (forthcoming). Evaluating the Existence Proof: LLMs as Cognitive Models of Language Acquisition. In In Artificial Knowledge of Language.
• Jordan Kodner. (2023). Laissez-Faire Analogical Change. Journal of Historical Syntax. 7(6-19). Proceedings of the 22nd Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference.
• Jordan Kodner. (2022). Language Acquisition Guiding Theory and Diachrony: A Case Study from Latin Morphology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 41:733–792.
• Jordan Kodner, Spencer Caplan, and Charles Yang. (2022). Another model not for the learning of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 119(29):e2204664119.
• Jordan Kodner. (2022). Computational Approaches to Morphology Acquisition. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia in Linguistics. Oxford University Press.
• {Spencer Caplan, Jordan Kodner}, and Charles Yang. (2020). Miller's Monkey Updated: Communicative Efficiency and the Statistics of Words in Natural Language. Cognition, 205:104466. (manuscript | source code | demo)
• Jordan Kodner. (2020). Modeling Language Change in the St. Louis Corridor. Language Variation and Change. 32(1). (manuscript | supplementary material [incorrect on LVC website] | source code)
• Kathryn Schuler, Jordan Kodner, and Spencer Caplan. (2020). Abstractions are good for brains and machines: A commentary on Ambridge (2020). First Language, 40(5-6):631–635.
• Jordan Kodner. (2019). Estimating child linguistic experience from historical corpora. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1):122.

2023

• Jordan Kodner, Salam Khalifa, Sarah Payne. (2023). Exploring Linguistic Probes for Morphological Generalization. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8933–8941.
• Héctor J. Vázquez Martínez, Annika Heuser, Charles Yang, Jordan Kodner. (2023). Evaluating Neural Language Models as Cognitive Models of Language Acquisition. In The first workshop on (benchmarking) generalisation in NLP (GenBench), pages 48-64.
• Jordan Kodner, Sarah Payne, Salam Khalifa, Zoey Liu. (2023). Morphological Inflection: A Reality Check. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 6082-6101.
• Salam Khalifa, Sarah Payne, Jordan Kodner, Ellen Broselow, Owen Rambow. (2023). A Cautious Generalization Goes a Long Way: Learning Morphophonological Rules. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 1793–1805.
• Jordan Kodner, Salam Khalifa, Sarah Payne, Zoey Liu. (2023). Re-Evaluating Neural Models of Morphological Inflection. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), 45:3259– 3267.

2022

• Salam Khalifa, Jordan Kodner, Owen Rambow. (2022). Learning Arabic Morphophonology. In Proceedings of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP), pages 295-301.
• Jordan Kodner, Salam Khalifa, et xxviii al. (2022). SIGMORPHON-UniMorph 2022 Shared Task 0: Generalization and Typologically Diverse Morphological Inflection. In Proceedings of the 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 176-203.
• Jordan Kodner and Salam Khalifa. (2022). SIGMORPHON-UniMorph 2022 Shared Task 0: Modeling Inflection in Language Acquisition. In Proceedings of the 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 157-175.
• Jordan Kodner. (2022). Modeling the Relationship between Input Distributions and Learning Trajectories with the Tolerance Principle. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL), pages 61-67.
• Aniket Kali & Jordan Kodner. (2022). Language Acquisition, Neutral Change, and Diachronic Trends in Noun classifiers. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (LChange), pages 11-22.

2021

• Caleb Belth, Sarah Payne, Deniz Beser, Jordan Kodner, & Charles Yang. (2021). The Greedy and Recursive Search for Morphological Productivity. In Proceedings of the 43th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci). 43:2869-2875.
• Sarah Payne, Jordan Kodner, & Charles Yang. (2021). Learning Morphological Productivity as Meaning-Form Mappings. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2021 (SCiL). pages 177-187.

2020

• Jordan Kodner & Nitish Gupta. (2020). Overestimation of Syntactic Representation in Neural Language Models. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 1757-1762.
• Hongzhi Xu, Jordan Kodner, Mitchell Marcus, & Charles Yang. (2020). Modeling Morphological Typology for Unsupervised Learning of Language Morphology. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the 58th Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 6672-6681.
• Justin Mott, Ann Bies, Stephanie Strassel, Jordan Kodner, Caitlin Richter, Hongzhi Xu, & Mitchell Marcus. (2020). Morphological Segmentation for Low Resource Languages. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), pages 3996-4002.
• Jordan Kodner & Caitlin Richter. (2020). Transparent /aɪ/-Raising as a Contact Phenomenon. In Penn Working Papers in Linguistics: Papers from NWAV, 25(2):61-70.

2019

• Sun Jae Lee & Jordan Kodner. (2019). Acquiring the Korean Causatives. In Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society Conference (CLS), 55(1):259-268.

2018

• Shyam Upadhyay, Jordan Kodner & Dan Roth. (2018). Bootstrapping Transliteration with Guided Discovery for Low-Resource Languages. in Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 501-511.
• Spencer Caplan & Jordan Kodner. (2018). The Acquisition of Vowel Harmony from Simple Local Statistics. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), 40:1442-1447.
• Jordan Kodner & Christopher M Cerezo Falco. (2018). A Framework for Representing Language Acquisition in a Population Setting. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 1149-1159.
• Jordan Kodner. (2018). Modeling Representational Constraints in Word Segmentation. In Proceedings of the 42nd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD), 42(1):391-399.
• Jordan Kodner. (2018). Syntactic Category Learning as Iterative Prototype-Driven Clustering. InProceedings for the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL) 2018, pages 44-54.

2017

• Jordan Kodner, Spencer Caplan, Hongzhi Xu, Mitch Marcus & Charles Yang. (2017). Case Studies in the Automatic Characterization of Grammars from Small Wordlists. In Proceedings for the 2nd Workshop on Computational Methods for Endangered Languages (ComputEL), pages 76-84.

• Jordan Kodner, Sarah Payne, Jeff Heinz. (2023). Why Linguistics Will Thrive in the 21st Century: A Reply to Piantadosi (2023).
• Jordan Kodner. (2020). Language Acquisition in the Past. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
• Jordan Kodner. (2016). Shona Subjects are Subjects.

• Jordan Kodner and Emmett Davitian. ""Irregulars" in the Italian Past Participles." LSA 2025. Philadelphia.
• Jordan Kodner and Sarah Payne. "Formally defining the learning setting for child language acquisition." Computational Models of Learnability and Acquisition of Morphology and Phonology special session at LSA 2025. Philadelphia.

2024

• (invited). Jordan Kodner. "Child Language Acquisition and a Mechanistic View of Language Change." CUNY Graduate Center Linguistics Colloquium. New York.
• (keynote). Jordan Kodner. "Child Language Acquisition and a Mechanistic View of Language Change." The 25th Conference on Dichronic Generative Syntax Conference. Mannheim, Germany. (slides)
• (invited). Jordan Kodner. "Is it Language or Task Design? Reinterpreting language models' recent successes in morphology and syntax learning." OFAI Lecture Series. Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI).
• (invited). Jordan Kodner. "The Language or the Task Design? Re-Evaluating Morphological Inflection Tasks." Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series. University of Toronto. (slides)
• (invited). Jordan Kodner. "'Elsewhere Reversal' in Tehrani Armenian: A Case of Language Acquisition-Driven Language Change." Lectures on Iranian Linguistics in Arizona (LILA). University of Arizona.

2023

• Jordan Kodner, Salam Khalifa, Sarah Payne. "Exploring Linguistic Probes for Morphological Generalization." EMNLP 2023. Singapore. (slides)
• Héctor J. Vázquez Martínez, Annika Heuser, Charles Yang, Jordan Kodner. "Evaluating Neural Language Models as Cognitive Models of Language Acquisition." GenBench Workshop. Singapore. (slides)
• (invited). "Language Acquisition and a Process-Centered View of Language Change." National University of Singapore.
• (invited). "Modeling Language Change from the Population's Perspective". SYNC Conference 2023. Stony Brook University. Stony Brook, NY. (slides)
• (invited). "Language Acquisition and a Process-Centered View of Language Change." Harvard Indo-European Workshop and Linguistics Colloquium Series. Cambridge, MA. (slides)
• (invited). "Language Acquisition and a Process-Centered View of Language Change." The 26th Congress on Historical Linguistics: Workshop on "New methods for old languages: the comparability of data", Heidelberg, Germany. (slides)
• Jordan Kodner, Sarah Payne, Salam Khalifa, Zoey Liu. "Morphological Inflection: A Reality Check." ACL 2023. Toronto. (poster)
• Jordan Kodner and Hossep Dolatian. "A Case of 'Elsewhere Reversal' in Iranian Armenian Verbs." The 47th Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC47), University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. (slides)

2022

• (invited). "Language Acquisition: Actuation of Change." SILPAC (Research Unit of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) Meeting, Frankenstein (Pfalz), Germany. (slides)
• Jordan Kodner. "Over-regularization unites disparate paradoxical diachronic patterns in phonology, morphology, and syntax." The Third AMC Symposium: Change in syntax and phonology: the same or different?, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh. (slides)
• Jordan Kodner and Hossep Dolatian. "'Elsewhere Reversal' in Iranian Armenian Verbs." The Third AMC Symposium: Change in syntax and phonology: the same or different?, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh. (poster)
• Jordan Kodner, Salam Khalifa, et xviii al. (2022). SIGMORPHON-UniMorph 2022 Shared Task 0 . SIGMORPHON 2022. (summary slides).
• Jordan Kodner. "Modeling the Relationship between Input Distributions and Learning Trajectories with the Tolerance Principle." CMCL 2022, Dublin. (poster)
• (invited) "The Latin Past Participles: What acquisition and diachrony tell us about morphological theory." Feast and Famine Workshop, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.
• Jordan Kodner. "Input sparsity and derivational relationships in Latin and Spanish." How Productive is Derivational Morphology? workshop at DGfS 2022. (slides).

2021

• Jordan Kodner. "Laissez-Faire Analogical Change." DiGS 22.
• {Jordan Kodner, Spencer Caplan}, & Charles Yang. "Apparent Communicative Efficiency in the Lexicon is Emergent." SCiL 2021 and CMU (invited).

2020

• (invited with Spencer Caplan) "Miller's Monkey Updated: Communicative Efficiency and the Statistics of Words in Natural Language." University of Pennsylvania.
• Jordan Kodner & Nitish Gupta. "Overestimation of Syntactic Representation in Neural Language Models" ACL 2020, Seattle.
• Hongzhi Xu, Jordan Kodner, Mitchell Marcus, & Charles Yang. Modeling Morphological Typology for Unsupervised Learning of Language Morphology. ACL 2020, Seattle.
• Jordan Kodner. "Language Acquisition Guiding Theory and Diachrony: A Case Study from Latin Morphology." GLOW 43, Berlin and NYU (invited). (slides)
• Jordan Kodner. "Acquiring the Latin Past Participles: Synchronic and Diachronic Implications." LSA 2020, New Orleans and TLS 2020, Austin, TX. (slides)

2019

• (invited). "Language Change as Learners' Response to 'Monolingual' Variation." National University of Singapore.
• Jordan Kodner. "Productivity Learning Driving Analogical Change in Proto-Germanic." East Coast Indo-European Conference XXXVIII, Philadelphia. (slides)
• Sun Jae Lee & Jordan Kodner. "Acquiring the Korean Causatives." AIMM 4, Stony Brook, NY and CLS55, Chicago. (slides)
• Hongzhi Xu, Jordan Kodner, Mitchell Marcus, & Charles Yang. "Unsupervised Learning of Language Morphology by Exploring Language Typology" AIMM 4, Stony Brook, NY.
• {Jordan Kodner & Caitlin Richter}. "Emergence of Partial /aɪ/-Raising through Child Language Acquisition in a Mixed Input Setting." LSA 2019, New York. (poster)
• Jordan Kodner. "Investigating Acquisition in Unattested Dead Languages." LSA 2019, New York. (slides)

2018

• (invited). "A Learners' Perspective on the History of the English Dative Constructions." University of Mannheim and University of Konstanz (slides)
• Shyam Upadhyay, Jordan Kodner & Dan Roth. "Bootstrapping Transliteration with Guided Discovery for Low-Resource Languages." EMNLP 2018, Brussels. (poster)
• Jordan Kodner & Caitlin Richter. "Partial /aɪ/-Raising as a Contact Phenomenon." NWAV 47, New York. (slides)
• Spencer Caplan & Jordan Kodner. "The Acquisition of Vowel Harmony from Simple Local Statistics." CogSci 2018, Madison, WI. (poster)
• Jordan Kodner & Christopher M Cerezo Falco. "A Framework for Representing Language Acquisition in a Population Setting." ACL 2018, Melbourne. (slides)
• Jordan Kodner. "Analogical Change as Rule Learning Gone Wrong: The Lengthened *ē-Grade in Proto-Germanic Strong Verbs." Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable, Berkeley, CA and GLAC 24, State College, PA. (slides)
• Jordan Kodner. "Part-of-Speech Learning as Iterative Prototype-Driven Clustering." SCiL 2018, Salt Lake City. (slides)

2017

• Jordan Kodner. "Modeling Population Structure and Language Change in the St. Louis Corridor." NWAV 46, Madison, WI. (slides)
• Jordan Kodner. "Modeling Representational Constraints in Word Segmentation." BUCLD 42, Boston. (poster)
• Jordan Kodner & Charles Yang. "The Acquisition and Actuation of the English Dative Constructions." LAGB 2017, Kent, UK.
• Jordan Kodner & Christopher M. Cerezo Falco. "Principled assessment of population structure in models of language change." DiGS 2017, Stellenbosch, WC, South Africa. (slides)
• Jordan Kodner. "A Learners’ Perspective on the Rise of the English Dative Alternation." DiGS 2017, Stellenbosch, WC, South Africa. (slides)
• Spencer Caplan & Jordan Kodner. "Vowel Harmony as a Distributional Learning Problem." CogSci 2017, London. (poster)
• Jordan Kodner. "The Importance of Population Structure in Models of Language Change." FWAV 4, York, UK. (slides | source code)
• Jordan Kodner. "Shona Subjects are Subjects." ACAL48, Bloomington, IN, and PLC41, Philadelphia. (poster)
• Jordan Kodner, Spencer Caplan, Hongzhi Xu, Mitch Marcus, & Charles Yang. "Case Studies in the Automatic Characterization of Grammars from Small Wordlists." ComputEL-2, Honolulu. (source code | poster)

2016

• {Jordan Kodner & Spencer Caplan.} "A Computational Model of Vowel Harmony Acquisition." NECPhon10, Amherst, MA. (slides)

Page views since August 2020:

Time capsule: Jordan Kodner on the Web (UPenn).

Regions I've been to in... Canada, Austria/Germany/Liech./Switz., Singapore, USA, World.

There is one other person who shares my name. He works for the University of South Carolina.