Aaron White
he/him/his
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Director of Center for Language Sciences
Directors of the FACTS.lab
PhD, University of Maryland, 2015
- Office Location
- 511A Lattimore Hall
- Web Address
- Website
Office Hours: By appointment
Biography
Prof. Aaron White joined the Department of Linguistics in July 2017. He graduated with his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2015. His dissertation, Information and Incrementality in Syntactic Bootstrapping, was advised by Valentine Hacquard and Jeffrey Lidz. Prior to coming to Rochester, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Science of Learning Institute with affiliations in the Department of Cognitive Science and the Center for Language and Speech Processing. While at Hopkins, he worked on the JHU Decompositional Semantics Initiative (Decomp), led by Ben Van Durme and Kyle Rawlins, and he led the MegaAttitude Project with Kyle Rawlins.
Research Overview
The human ability to convey information about possible past, present, and future configurations of things in the world is undergirded by systematic relationships between intricately structured linguistic expressions and the dizzying array of conceptual categories available to humans. The FACTS.lab investigates (a) which of these conceptual categories can be related to which sorts of linguistic expressions, (b) what those relationships look like, and (c) how they can be leveraged for building better natural language understanding (NLU) systems.
Research Interests
- Computational Linguistics
- Natural Language Semantics
Courses Offered (subject to change)
- LING 214/414: Statistical Methods in Linguistics
- LING 224/424: Intro to Computational Linguistics
- LING 282/482: Deep Learning in Computational Linguistics