pmheider@.edu
601 baldy hall
(716) 645.0113

Resume

Course List

| Full Resume |
| Teaching Focus |
| Programming Focus |

| teaching | research and journals | news and updates | diversions | ub miscellany |

Teaching Experience

The Roots of English (LIN108: F07 and Su08)
Word roots in English, their history and development, meanings and combinations, usage and variations. Borrowings into and from English. English as a world language.

Research Interests

Textual Entailment (rte.php)
Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition
The indirect benefit of this project is learning how to adapt computer models to classroom programs. The direct benefit is improving our understanding of the ex- and implicit knowledge required to understand a text and a word.
SNePS
Currently, I am trying to streamline the natural language processing done by CASSIE. Building off bits by David Pierce, I am working to fuse LKB with SNePS. Following Pierce's lead, this project goes by the handle Sfy (which I pronounce as a rhyme with `by').

Backburner Projects

Here lie the projects that time requires I not focus on for a spell. It doesn't take much to get me interested again.
Readability
My main interest in readability is rethinking measures of complexity from a stronger linguistic and psychological standpoint. Also, I would like to see the classic indices extended to account for more language families. Lastly, I am interested in L2 curricula which include ranked readings selected from a wider corpus.
L2 Education
I would like to develop curricula for difficulty-ranked readings (mentioned above) to challenge learners and foster organic vocabulary growth. The reciprocal of that project is honing word choice for non-native speakers. I've laid out my initial thoughts in something I call "Ontologically Speaking." Another (as yet unpursued) venue is computer modeling of students' L2 knowledge to predict gaps and help tailor lesson plans. A simple example is documenting the implications and entailments of conjunctions in the source and target languages. A third branch of some interesting L2 research points towards text-based gaming. In the spring of 2008, I failed to get funding for my EduMUDE project.
Humor
At my undergrad Grinnell, I explored Gricean Pragmatics as an explanatory tool. Now I am more interested in creating productive and predictive theories of humor in language.
Fallacy and Language Abuse

Work Bench

LaTeX Templates
A colleague and I created an IPA template with the associated vowel chart. Beyond the more common packages (e.g., BibTeX and tipa), there are many tools built especially for linguistics. babel provides very, very diverse language support. covington and gb4e both provide commands for glossing. pstricks (with pst-node and pst-tree) helps with syntax homework and any other reason to draw crazy diagrams. I've created a template for phrase structure trees (source) and another for grammatical relation diagrams (source) using pstricks. Keep in mind, these are still drafts. I'll add commentary and variation as I find it useful. I have made two resume templates in LaTeX. One is available from my site. You can see the other in action on Jordana Heller's page.
Scripts and Algorithms
Brain Candy
Blogs: The Language Log | LanguageHat | Tenser, said the Tensor
Podcasts: The Word Nerds
Clips: Fluent Dysphasia
Games: Lexicon (from LinguistList) | Boggle | Scrabble | FrOZ
Programs
Praat [very handy for speech analysis or phonetics work]
Festival [a speech synthesis system]