Dave Howcroft
Graduate Student
Dept. of Linguistics
Telephone: 614.285.4368
Email: [my first name].[my last name] --at-- gmail.com
Find me on: LinkedIn ||| Twitter ||| Facebook ||| Academia.edu
my most recent resume/cv as: HTML ||| PDF
Graduate Student
Dept. of Linguistics
Telephone: 614.285.4368
Email: [my first name].[my last name] --at-- gmail.com
Find me on: LinkedIn ||| Twitter ||| Facebook ||| Academia.edu
my most recent resume/cv as: HTML ||| PDF
I'm in my second year pursuing a PhD in linguistics at the Ohio State University. I received my undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Linguistics from the University of Georgia in 2010. I enjoy board games with my mates and singing in the choir at the Newman Center most weeks, but I'm also chronically curious and liable to be interested in subjects as diverse as of quantum computating, privacy and intellectual property rights, theatre, and video games.
My research focuses on automatic text simplification, a problem at the nexus of semantics, natural language generation, and psycholinguistics. The ultimate goal is to produce a system which can (1) extract a semantic representation from natural text, (2) generate paraphrases from such a representation, and (3) rank paraphrases based upon psycholinguistically-motivated metrics of complexity.
I'm currently focussing on the evaluating different psycholinguistic metrics for this purpose on the basis of their discriminative power in comparison to more simplified measures like word and sentence length. In particular, I'm wrapping up experiments in which I am ranking sentences of English and Simple English Wikipedia using memory depth and surprisal. This summer I'll be extending this work by examining dependency length and some notion of propositional idea density to provide a (somewhat) comprehensive review of complexity metrics for my first qualifying paper this fall.
So what is linguistics anyway? There are plenty of sources out there you can find to answer this question for yourself, but among the best breakdowns I've seen is this two-page introduction Basic Facts about Linguistics (PDF) written by one of our faculty at Ohio State, Carl Pollard.