RI:EAGER: A Montclair Group in Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Language and Speech Processing: An Exploration

The PI together with her students are exploring the possibility of establishing a research group in Language and Speech Processing at Montclair State University as a venue for faculty and students to bring together their cross-disciplinary strengths, share ideas, collaborate on research topics, and discuss the current state of the arts. Students are acquiring valuable research experiences rooted in on-going multi-disciplinary projects designed and managed by experienced faculty in the fields of Linguistics, Computer Science, Psychology, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Political Science, Anthropology, Mathematics, Biology, and Management and Information Systems.

The research objectives are to 1) study language comprehension, production, acquisition, and representation through a combination of computational modeling and experimental multidisciplinary studies, 2) create and evaluate technology to automatically analyze a wide range of speech, text, and document image data in multiple languages, and 3) understand such aspects of intelligent performance as perception, language processing, planning, problem solving, reasoning, and learning, in terms of both the computational processes that underlie these skills and the computational mechanisms that may instantiate them.

The group will provide an enriching educational experience by exposing the students to non-classroom faculty-student interactions, academic-industry, multidisciplinary research interaction and the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with state-of-the-art language technology. This project aims to increase the number of women, minorities and students who engage in computing research, improve oral and written communication and knowledge dissemination skills of the participating students through regular group presentations, research discussion and conference article submissions.