Paul M. Heider

I am a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at SUNY Buffalo. Rumor has it that a dissertation is on the way. I actually got a start in Linguistics during my undergrad at Grinnell College.

For a fourth year, I am an intern 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 in sentence processing. To that end, my dissertation juxtaposes predictions made by semantic predictability with those made by pragmatic inferences about verbs and how their participant roles are realized. The dissertation is part of a larger research program to explore the organization of our mental lexicon. By understanding properties of the connections between words and concepts (and not just properties of words and concepts), we can develop a clearer understanding of the mental lexicon as a dynamic structure. Part of that dynamic structure which I have had the opportunity to explore in other projects is the mapping function from surface forms to underlying representations. What are the implications of these different mapping functions and how specific are they to a given task, individual, or language?

(See my projects page for a list of recent work)

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

Doug Roland's Computational Psycholinguistics Group

Gail Mauner's Psycholinguistics Group

``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.''

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]