Member Spotlights
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June 2, 2023First Cohort Graduates from UBCO’s Bachelor of Nsyilxcn Language Fluency Program
UBC Okanagan’s Bachelor of Nsyilxcn Language Fluency program, which launched in 2021, will watch its first cohort of students graduate this summer having completed the brand-new degree program. Not only have the students acquired profound knowledge of the language from the program, but they’re also…
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June 1, 2023Member Spotlight: Dr. Giuseppe Carenini
Dr. Giuseppe Carenini is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He has broad interdisciplinary interests and his work on Natural Language Processing and Information Visualization to support decision making has been published in over 100 peer-reviewed papers …
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May 5, 2023Reduction of Vowel Space in Alzheimer's Disease - Q&A with Arian Shamei
Reduced vowel space area (VSA) is a known effect of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease (PD). In the study, 'Reduction of Vowel Space in Alzheimer's Disease' by Arian Shamei, Yadong Liu and Dr. Bryan Gick, using large publicly available corpuses, two experiments were conducted…
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May 5, 2023A Review of Three Recent Dictionaries of Indigenous Languages Spoken in South America - Q&A with Ana Laura Arrieta-Zamudio
In the essay, 'A Review of Three Recent Dictionaries of Indigenous Languages Spoken in South America,' authors Dr. Mark Turin, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UBC, and Ana Laura Arrieta-Zamudio, PhD Student in Linguistics at UBC, compare three recent dictionaries of Indigenous…
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March 28, 2023Sign Language Phonetic Annotator and Analyzer: changing how sign languages are transcribed
A new software being developed is allowing researchers to give detailed, phonetic transcriptions of signs used in sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), one of the sign languages used in Canada. The Sign Language Phonetic Annotator/Analyzer (SLP-AA) is a graphical user interface…
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March 5, 2023LSURC 2023: Connecting undergrads from all backgrounds through language research
Students have countless opportunities available to explore language and communication throughout their undergraduate careers, though gaining valuable research experience in those fields is an opportunity many undergraduate students feel isn’t readily available to them. Fortunately, the Language…
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March 2, 2023UBC scholar, Ife Adebara, helping AI overcome its language barrier
People around the world have been impressed with ChatGPT, a new chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses natural language processing (NLP) to seemingly answer any question. It works much better than similar technologies that came before it—as long as you prompt it in English. Ife…
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February 3, 2023Member Spotlight: Dr. Sonam Chusang
Dr. Sonam Chusang is an Adjunct Professor in the Asian Studies department at the University of British Columbia where he has been teaching Tibetan to students of heritage and non-heritage backgrounds for the past 15 years. He also taught Tibetan at the University of Virginia in 2007. What…
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February 3, 2023Language Creation in Hollywood with Dr. Christine Schreyer
Within the book titled, 'Communicating Linguistics, Language, Community and Public Engagement,' Dr. Christine Schreyer, Associate Professor of Athropology at UBC's Okanagan campus, describes her role as a language creator for two Hollywood films – Man of Steel (2013) and Alpha (2018) in…
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January 6, 2023Intentional and Incidental Vocabulary Learning: The Role of Historical Linguistics in Language Acquisition - Q&A with Dr. James Stratton
If you’re looking to learn a new language, you might want to start by taking a deep dive into historical linguistics. In the study, ‘Intentional and Incidental Vocabulary Learning: The Role of Historical Linguistics in the Second Language Classroom’, Dr. James Stratton, Assistant Professor in…