AI-Driven Hype in Classrooms: Navigating Ethical Issues - Presented!

During the summer of 2023, Lex Konnelly and Nathan Sanders presented on AI "hype" in classrooms to help instructors address issues bubbling to the surface as ChatGPT's range broadens with each question it is asked by some unsuspecting student. 

Addressing ethical and pedagogical considerations for AI-driven text generation in classrooms, particularly of linguistics, they presented a foray into the ever-changing landscape evolving at a rate "faster than scholars can publish work on them" (Sanders).

Though some faculty members with whom the researchers partnered focused on ways they could Chat-GPT-proof their assessments, others were interested in integrating such tools into their classwork.

Importantly, the researchers' approach is not punitive, but rather, constructive - an approach to merging of AI tools with educational models which will benefit not only morale in the classroom, but student media and technology literacy in a world rapidly going wireless.

Perhaps today's students can benefit from learning how to hack tools such as chatbots to maximize their potential for learning. 

Perhaps future integration of artificial intelligence brings with it the potential of a rapid decline or even total erasure of the capacity to learn hard skills.

Regardless, the researchers' position is that the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence are necessarily intertwined.

Due to tools' like Chat-GPT's reliance on large language models, students of both linguistics and computer science, or even artificial intelligence engineering, have much to gain by probing the threads linking their interests to each other, potentially by exploring something like the groundbreaking focus on Computational Linguistics offered by UofT. 

Presented by Konnelly at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in January, this work will be published soon as a proceedings paper. 

As Sanders and Konnelly will be the first to tell you, by the time this post goes live, this information may be obsolete. 

We at WHITL don't see this as a reason not to comment, but as an opportunity to mark our ideas on an AI-timeline quickly extending into the future, and an exciting chance to engage with all students across UofT. 

AI in the classroom poses all kinds of ethical questions for students and professors, and raises new questions every time it is used. This work gives us some interesting and thought-provoking ways of dealing with technology which passes the Turing Test daily, and (usually) with flying colours at that.

The heat is on this summer - you need SPF!

The 2024 annual Summer Phonetics - Phonology Forum (SPF) took place on August 7th, and now we know why they call it SPF!

UofT linguists, attendees and presenters alike, gathered for the reception, presentations, and lunch held at the Linguistics Lounge, pictured below.

Session 1, chaired by Professor Alexei Kochetov, saw presentations by both faculty and graduate students.

Louis Careri, Laura Griffin, Youmna Mohamed, Jemi Samuel, Avery Ozburn

Developing a model for community engagement in phonetics and phonology fieldwork

Louis Careri describes p-sided
challenges associated with fieldwork

Laura Griffin's YouTube Shorts Sample, a
language learning resource targeted towards the
younger generation of Mbembe speakers.

Yanfei Lu, 2024 Elan Dresher Prize winner  (see Elan below)

New approaches to stress patterns of Oneida 

Professor Yoonjung Kang chaired Session 2, seeing the following presentations:

Jessica Yeung

Where to go from here? Directionality and morphological structure in vowel harmony

Liam McFadden, Shana Rosenberg, Gianna Giovio Canavesi, Avery Ozburn

An artificial language learning experiment on rounding harmony target asymmetries

Lunch was held at Sidney Smith in the Linguistics Lounge.

Session 3, chaired by presenter and Professor Avery Ozburn, showcased two projects.

Jack Mahlmann

Can you hear the silence? Perceptual learning of plain-ejective contrast

 

B. Elan Dresher, namesake and founder of the prize of the same name (see Yanfei above)

Features and contrast: The universal versus the language particular 

Session 4 was chaired by Jessamyn Schertz, Professor of Language Studies at UTM.

Laura Escobar

Gender differences in f0, intonation and particle use in conversation and performative speech in Japanese

Derek Denis, Lauren Bigelow

Speech rhythm, stance, and sociolinguistic identity: Two case studies from Ontario Englishes

Session 5 was chaired by Professor Nathan Sanders, and saw the following presentations, followed by closing remarks.

Alessandro Jaker (Sisseton Wahpeton College)

How natural is tonal phonology? What happens to stress-tone interactions when tones reverse

Laura Griffin

Tonal alternations in Mwaghavul associative constructions

 

 

Closing remarks were brief! Thanks to everyone for participating and organizing!

WHITL and the Forum's organizers, Samuel Akinbo, Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Philip Monahan, Avery Ozburn, Nathan Sanders, and Jessamyn Schertz, have much to be proud of, and much to look forward to next year!

Linguistics Spotlight: Myrto Grigoroglou

WHITL Blog just got caught up with Myrto Grigoroglou’s many recent publications, coming out of 3 streams of research foci in just as many languages! 

Speaking to Grigoroglou about her research these past few months, many incredible projects come to light. A more comprehensive list can be found linked below. 

Read along to discover the impressive work being done by the Assistant Professor and her team.

Communication/development of pragmatic abilities: How children and adjust language to informational needs of listeners 

In the field of linguistics and cognitive science, researchers are concerned with the different ways in which people describe events to a third party who cannot see them occurring. 

Grigoroglou and her team probe this research, manipulating their experimental setup to get as much information out of the speaker as possible. Compiling this data, the team created a database comparing not only cross-linguistic data, but multi-modal signaling information. 

For example, in Turkish, considered to be a more gestured language than, say, English, speakers were found to gesture much more when presented with a familiar listener. 

Furthermore, the developmental component of this study, taking place in a naturalistic setting, is a novel one. Previously, studies mainly looked at the role of the addressee to examine how their involvement changed the speakers’ descriptions of events. 

This was Grigoroglou's launching pad as well: they started with the assumption that visual perception of a listener would affect a speaker's informativeness. Though this was enough to increase responsiveness in adults, they didn’t see meaningful changes with children. Having a naïve listener, however, did affect communication. 

In a step-wise approach, researchers manipulated the role of the listener, giving them more responsibility, a clear goal, and eventually interaction with the speaker. The most helpful listeners are, it turns out, naïve, familiar to the speaker, visible, and engaged. 

Though interaction increases how informative the speaker will be, this goes both ways. Researchers found that even an assumption that the listener was distracted was enough to decrease the amount of information they were willing to give. 

Being told by researchers that your listener is not paying attention, even if given visual or oral evidence to the contrary, is enough to shut down communication for most people. 

Communication factors in use of spatial languages: Language to describe space

This branch of Grigoroglou's work studies language used to describe space, words such as in/on. The team realized that when making static descriptions, people don't use out/off as much as they use motion descriptions. For example, instead of "the cat was off the rug," people might say "the cat was next to the rug" - a description more closely aligned with motion. 

Existing semantic theories say that these PPs (prepositional phrases) are ambiguous, and that motion PPs lie between static and motion prepositions. Analysis in the field currently says that  out/off are infelicitous, needing context in static descriptions. 

Grigoroglou and her team offer an alternative account: these are negative prepositions and have a negative meaning regardless of whether they are used in motion or static descriptions.

For something to come out of or off of means that means it was once in/on, and necessitates movement. Thus, in/out are complimentary antonyms existing in a relationship of entailment.

However, one of the most exciting aspects of this interview was discovering that, due to the similar spatial patterns of Turkish, French, and Greek, Grigoroglou's research results have universal validity. 

Acquisition of logical language/logical cognition: How children acquire conditionals

While working as a postdoctoral researcher studying the expression of hypothetical language in children aged 3-6, Grigoroglou was meeting in person with the participants and their parents to gauge how information is presented to familiar vs. non-familiar listeners. However, when the pandemic hit, this research was moved online. 

Trying to connect through Zoom, a new issue presented itself: a misalignment between the perspectives of speaker and listener, posing a newer, more intense need for information. Online data collection in this field reflects entirely different results than would appear in person.

Now, Grigoroglou is collecting child data from Turkish studies. This labor-intensive project, involving hundreds of hours of coding, is being completed by graduate students in Türkiye. 

This procedure for measuring gesturing in Turkish involves multiple steps. First, researchers segment speech into clauses. Next, they align the gestures with the speech segment using coding software called ELAN, which enables them to transcribe speech for clauses – for example, using 1 to code the presence of an instrument, and 0 to code its absence. Next, they look at and categorize gesture. This is partially done using a code book to standardize coding of otherwise hard-to-quantify movements. 

Plans for a second study in English, taking place in person, will manipulate knowledge of listener to see how that affects gesture. 

Looking Forward 

Myrto Grigoroglou and her team have much to look forward to as they prepare for the 2024-2025 academic year, and all that it will entail in the many fields of research in which they are conducting continuously impressive work. 

To read more about her work, see the three pieces discussed in this article linked below, or her profile on the University of Toronto's Discover Research page.

Multimodal Description of Instrument Events in Turkish and English 

Metaphor Comprehension in Preschoolers: A Pragmatic Skill

Logical language and the development of reasoning by the disjunctive syllogism

UofT Linguists Impress at the 2024 CLA Conference

From June 17-19, 2024, UofT Linguists trekked to Carleton University to attend the 2024 Canadian Linguistics Association (CLA) Conference. 

Will Williams, PhD student, shared this list of talks and posters by UofT people. Bolded names indicate University of Toronto affiliation.

Looking forward to CLA 2025, and the presentation of more incredible presentations such as the ones below!

Posters

Thales Buzan, Cristina Name & Laura Colantoni (Faculty)

Native English Speakers’ Perception of Questions Produced by L1 Brazilian Portuguese and L1 English Speakers

Caroline Mekhaeil (PhD student, UTM)

Could Individual Language Dominance Explain the Transfer to L3 French?

Caroline Mekhaeil presents poster

Samuel Akinbo (Faculty), Tongpan Fwangwar & Michael Bulkaam

Morphophonological Polarity in West Chadic Languages

Rim Dabbous, Marjorie Leduc (MA Alumna), David Ta-Chun Shen & Charles Reiss

Locality in phonology is epiphenomenal

Radu Craioveanu (Alum)

Long and short diphthongs in North Saami

Radu Craioveanu presents poster

Liam McFadden (Undergrad), Avery Ozburn (Faculty) & Samuel Akinbo (Faculty) - Best Poster!

Language mapping for linguists

Liam McFadden presents poster

Talks

Ash Asudeh, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Neil Myler, Daniel Siddiqi & Lisa Sullivan (Alum)

Metasyncretism and secondary exponence in LRFG

Samantha Jackson (incoming Faculty, ex-postdoc) & Derek Denis (Faculty)

Speaking of immigrants: Commentary on the aural employability of (non-)Canadian English

Samira Ghanbarnejadnaeini (MA Alum)

“Woman, Life, Freedom:” A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender and Political Activism

Laurestine Bradford (MA Alum)

A Source of Conativity in Tlingit Pluractional Verbs

Angelika Kiss (PhD student), Jianing Zhou, & Justin Leung (PhD student)

Declarative questions in Shanghainese and Cantonese

Yawovi Godo, Lydia Mei, Andreea Cristina Nicolae & Lyn Tieu (Faculty)

Étude expérimentale des propriétés d’exhaustivité de la disjonction en français : L’interaction de l’exclusivité, du libre choix, et des implicatures ad hoc

Lisa Sullivan (Alum) & Nicole Rosen (Alum)

/e/-/i/ overlap in Manitoba English

Calvin Quick (PhD Student)

Agreement with nominal antecedents in Welsh

Simone Diana Zamarlik (Alumni)

Preposition stranding in a non-preposition-stranding language: The puzzle of optional preposition omission under sluicing in Polish

Crystal Chen (PhD Student), Lyn Tieu (Faculty) & Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (Faculty)

Investigating the role of gaze and the semantics of demonstratives in referent identification

Samuel Jambrović (PhD Student), Awarded "Honorable Mention"

Defending predicativism: Lessons from Barbie

Nadia Takhtaganova (PhD Student) & Barend Beekhuizen (Faculty)

Variation in the Morphosemantics of Postnominal Prepositions: The Case of Romance A

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (Faculty) & Sahar Taghipour (Alumni)

Ezafe in the context of PPs

Justin R. Leung (PhD Student)

I’m like, “Like is not a complementizer, it seems like”

Dionatan Cardozo (Visiting student)

Quantified Phrases in Brazilian Portuguese: Preliminary Experimental Results

Christiana Moser (PhD Student), Bahar Tarakcı, Ercenur Ünal & Myrto Grigoroglou (Faculty)

Multimodal recipient mentions in possession-transfer event descriptions: language-specificity outweighs conceptual peripherality

Patrick Kinchsular (Undergrad)

External Possession in Kinyarwanda: A Tale of Two Applicatives

Annie Chong, Avery Ozburn (Faculty) & Tamam Youssouf

Phonologically-conditioned allomorphy in Oromo plurals

Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (Faculty), Laura Colantoni (Faculty), Danielle Thomas (alum) & Crystal Chen (PhD Student)

Gender in Toronto Heritage Spanish

Anissa Baird (PhD Student) & Emily Atkinson (Faculty)

Five- & Eight-Year-Olds’ Interpretation of Ambiguous They