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.
The official (slightly out of date) description: An introduction to computational linguistics for students with previous programming experience.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.
The official (slightly out of date) description: Introduction to the field of language acquisition.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-3:00pm 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
Note: Proceedings published in the ACL conference and workshop anthologies (ACL, ComputEL, EMNLP, LREC, SCiL) are refereed and archival.
Sarah Payne, Caleb Belth, Deniz Bezer, Jordan Kodner, & Charles Yang. (to appear). The Greedy and Recursive Search for Morphological Productivity. Proceedings of the 43th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Jordan Kodner "Laissez-Faire Analogical Change." DiGS 22.
{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.
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)