Jordan Kodner on the Web

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

Spring 2021 Information
About Me
Journal Articles
Proceedings
Presentations

I am an assistant professor in the Stony Brook University Department of Linguistics and affiliate member of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. My primary research revolves around computational approaches to child language acquisition and their broader implications. In particular,

Algorithmic models of grammar learning
How those processes drive language variation and change
What insights they provide for low-resource NLP

In 2020, I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics, where I worked with Charles Yang and Mitch Marcus. My dissertation, Language Acquisition in the Past, investigated the relationship between child language acquisition and language change. 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.

My other academic interests include (alphabetically): formal language theory, Indo-European historical linguistics, Latin language, general NLP, paleontology and cladistics, Roman history and culture, Shona language, Singlish/Singaporean English, software engineering, and writing systems.

Current Courses

LIN 220: Computational Linguistics Mondays and Fridays 1:00-2:20pm US Eastern Time online.

The official (slightly out of date) description:
An introduction to computational linguistics for students with previous programming experience. This course explores the models, algorithms, and techniques that dominate modern-day language technology, and it evaluates them from a linguistically informed perspective. Topics include corpus-based methods, finite-state approaches, machine learning, and model evaluation techniques. Great emphasis is put on discussing the limitations of existing techniques and how they might benefit from linguistic insights. Students will also hone their programming skills and develop familiarity with state-of-the-art software packages for computational linguistics.

TA: Jon Rawski

LIN 330: Language Acquisition Mondays and Wednesdays 2:40-4:00pm US Eastern Time online.

The official (slightly out of date) description:
Introduction to the field of language acquisition. Issues include cognitive processes, role of innate ability and environment, developmental stages, individual variation, universal tendencies, interaction of language and cognition, bilingualism, similarities and differences between first- and second-language acquisition, and language disorders.

TA: Yang Liu (yang.liu.11@...)

Office Hours

General Office Hours: On Zoom, Thursdays 1:00pm-2:30pm US Eastern Time or by appointment

LIN 220 Only: On Zoom, Fridays 2:20pm-3:00pm US Eastern Time

LIN 330 Only: On Zoom, Wednesdays 4:00pm-4:40pm US Eastern Time

Check your syllabi or email me for meeting IDs.

{Spencer Caplan, Jordan Kodner}, and Charles Yang. (2020). Miller's Monkey Updated: Communicative Efficiency and the Statistics of Words in Natural Language. Cognition. (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)
Jordan Kodner. (2019). Estimating child linguistic experience from historical corpora. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1), 122.
Jordan Kodner. (under review). A Learners' Perspective on the Rise of the English to-Dative. (contact for manuscript).
Jordan Kodner. (in prep). Language Acquisition Guiding Theory and Diachrony: A Case Study from Latin Morphology. (contact for manuscript).

Commentaries and Reviews

Kathryn Schuler, Jordan Kodner, and Spencer Caplan. (2020). Abstractions are good for brains and machines: A commentary on Ambridge (2020). First Language.

Note: Proceedings published in the ACL conference and workshop anthologies (ACL, EMNLP, ComputEL, LREC, SCiL) are refereed and archival.

Sarah Payne, Jordan Kodner, & Charles Yang. (to appear). Learning Morphological Productivity as Meaning-Form Mappings. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics. 1(1).
Jordan Kodner & Nitish Gupta. (2020). Overestimation of Syntactic Representation in Neural Language Models. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 58(2):1757-1762.
Hongzhi Xu, Jordan Kodner, Mitchell Marcus, & Charles Yang. (2020). Modeling Morphological Typology for Unsupervised Learning of Language Morphology. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 58(1):6672-6681.
Sun Jae Lee & Jordan Kodner. (to appear). Acquiring the Korean Causatives. Proceedings of the 55th Annual Chicago Linguistics Society Conference. 54.
Justin Mott, Ann Bies, Stephanie Strassel, Jordan Kodner, Caitlin Richter, Hongzhi Xu, & Mitchell Marcus. (2020). Morphological Segmentation for Low Resource Languages. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. 12:3996-4002.
Jordan Kodner & Caitlin Richter. (2020). Transparent /aɪ/-Raising as a Contact Phenomenon. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV. 25(2).
Shyam Upadhyay, Jordan Kodner & Dan Roth. (2018). Bootstrapping Transliteration with Guided Discovery for Low-Resource Languages. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 23(1):501-511.
Spencer Caplan & Jordan Kodner. (2018). The Acquisition of Vowel Harmony from Simple Local Statistics. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 40(1):1442-1447.
Jordan Kodner & Christopher M Cerezo Falco. (2018). A Framework for Representing Language Acquisition in a Population Setting. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 56(1):1149-1159.
Jordan Kodner. (2018). Modeling Representational Constraints in Word Segmentation. Proceedings of the 42nd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. 42(1):391-399.
Jordan Kodner. (2018). Syntactic Category Learning as Iterative Prototype-Driven Clustering. Proceedings for the Society for Computation in Linguistics. 1(1):44-54.
Jordan Kodner, Spencer Caplan, Hongzhi Xu, Mitch Marcus & Charles Yang. (2017). Case Studies in the Automatic Characterization of Grammars from Small Wordlists. Proceedings for the 2nd Workshop on Computational Methods for Endangered Languages. 2(1):88-96.

2021

{Jordan Kodner, Spencer Caplan}, & Charles Yang "Apparent Communicative Efficiency in the Lexicon is Emergent." SCiL 2021.

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)