Paul M. Heider

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Linguistics Department at SUNY Buffalo. I actually got a start in Linguistics during my undergrad at Grinnell College. Someday soon, I will apply to the Cognitive Science track because of my interests in computer modeling and psychological methods, among others.

For a second year, I am serving as an RA at Janya, Inc. They have a nice blend of both the C and L in Computational Linguistics.

Rather than take my grad student budget out on my food choices, I shoot for cheap transportation. You see, I'm a big fan of cooking but ramen only provides so much variety of recipe. Also, biking to school and around town (yes, even in the winter) gives me some much needed exercise. Given some free time, I find myself crusading the merits of sci-fi and fantasy.

Research Interests

My primary research interests are in modeling semantic and discourse influences on sentence processing. To that end, I plan to investigate the organization of and connections within our mental lexicon. For instance, what mechanisms allow context to bias interpretation? How much of an interpretation only exists because of some context? My ultimate research goal is to explore reading complexity from a strong cross-linguistic and psychological standpoint to better differentiate language-specific from Language-general processing hurdles.

• Topic Segmentation for Multi-Party Chat
• Folopa Grammar Description (pdp, ppo)

(See my research projects page for a fuller list)

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.

Lab Groups

Computational Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics

``The research in this lab focuses on the mental representations and processing mechanisms involved in the comprehension of sentences and discourses. It is supported by a grant from NIMH.''

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').

Papuan Language Descriptions

Folks from a Typology of Papuan Languages class decided to continue work on the language descriptions developed over the fall semester.

Work Bench

LaTeX has its own page, now.

Programs & Utilities

Festival [a speech synthesis system]

GATE [good for annotating text and piping it through parsers/pattern matchers/etc.]

JabRef [simple front-end for editing BibTeX entries, tagging, etc.]

Praat [very handy for speech analysis or phonetics work]

StarDict [dictionary program front-end for open-source lexicon back-ends]

Winefish [LaTeX editor]