John Hale

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Arch Professor in World Languages and Cultures

I joined UGA's fantastic Linguistics Department in Fall 2018 after a stint as a full-time research scientist at Deepmind. My work centers on language comprehension -- how are we able to understand one another, just by hearing a sequence of words, one by one?  I have sought to answer this question through cognitive modeling -- analyzing the human mind via computer simulation. For more on this line of research, check out this book-length monograph.

I am happily married to Peggy Renwick.

Education:

PhD (Cognitive Science) Johns Hopkins University 2003

ScB (Cognitive Science) Brown University 1998

Areas of Interest:
Computational Linguistics
Corpus Methods
Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics
Specific Research Areas:

Computational linguistics, Cognitive science

Grants:

Neuro-computational models of natural language

Selected Publications:

Modeling Structure-Building in the Brain With CCG Parsing and Large Language Models. With Miloš Stanojević, Jonathan R. Brennan, Donald Dunagan and Mark Steedman. Cognitive Science 2023. Read about this work in Project Showcase.

Quantifying Discourse Support for Omitted Pronouns. With Shulin Zhang and Jixing Li. Proceedings of CRAC Workshop at COLING2022.

Long-distance linguistic dependencies in Chinese and English brains. With Donald Dunagan, Miloš Stanojević, Maximin Coavoux, Shulin Zhang, Shohini Bhattasali, Jixing Li and Jonathan Brennan. Neurobiology of Language 2023. Read the News Item about this work.

Neural correlates of semantic number: A cross-linguistic investigation. With Donald Dunagan, Shulin Zhang, Jixing Li, Shohini Bhattasali, Christophe Pallier, John Whitman and Yiming Yang. Brain and Language 2022.

Decoding the silence: Neural bases of zero pronoun resolution in Chinese. With Shulin Zhang, Jixing Li and Yiming Yang. Brain and Language 2022.

Le Petit Prince multilingual naturalistic fMRI corpus. With Jixing Li, Shohini Bhattasali, Berta Franzluebbers, Wen-Ming Luh, R. Nathan Spreng, Jonathan R. Brennan, Yiming Yang and Christophe Pallier. Scientific Data 2022.

Neurocomputational Models of Language Processing. With Luca Campanelli, Jixing Li, Shohini Bhattasali, Christophe Pallier and Jonathan R. Brennan. Annual Review of Lingustics. volume 8 pages 427--446. 2022. 

Quantifying Structural and Non-structural Expectations in Relative Clause Processing. With Zhong Chen. Cognitive Science 2021.

Modeling Incremental Language Comprehension in the Brain with Combinatory Categorial Grammar. With Miloš Stanojević, Shohini Bhattasali, Donald Dunagan, Luca Campanelli, Mark Steedman and Jonathan Brennan. CMCL Workshop 2021.

The Alice Datasets: fMRI & EEG Observations of Natural Language Comprehension. With Shohini Bhattasali, Jonathan Brennan, Wen-Ming Luh, Berta Franzluebbers. LREC 2020.

Text Genre and Training Data Size in Human-like Parsing. With Adhiguna Kuncoro, Keith Hall, Chris Dyer & Jonathan Brennan. Proceedings of EMNLP 2019. poster.

Finding Syntax in Human Encephalography with Beam Search. With Chris Dyer, Adhiguna Kuncoro and Jonathan R. Brennan.  Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Note: received Best Paper award.

Localising Memory Retrieval and Syntactic Composition: an fMRI study of naturalistic language comprehension. With Shohini Bhattasali, Murielle Fabre, Wen-Ming Luh, Hazem Al Saied, Mathieu Constant, Christophe Pallier, Jonathan R. Brennan and R. Nathan Spreng. Language, Cognition & Neuroscience 2018

 

 

Courses Taught:
LING 3350
LING 4570/6570
LING (ENGL) 4886/6886
LING (ARTI)(PSYC)(PHIL) 3550
LING 4900/6900
ANTH(LING) 8880
LING 8580
Articles Featuring John Hale

Different Word Orders, Same Brain Areas

Linguistics PhD student Donald Dunagan has been comparing brain activity in speakers of English and Chinese.

photo of Hale, Renwick, and Langston

Linguistics faculty receive NSF grant

Keith Langston, Professor of Linguistics, was recently awarded a three-year, $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study endangered languages on the Istrian peninsula of Croatia and the Kvarner Bay in the northern Adriatic Sea.

image from article

PhD student Shulin Zhang publishes article in Brain and Language

PhD student Shulin Zhang is the co-author (with John Hale, Jixing Li, and Yiming Yang) of an article "Decoding the silence: Neural bases of zero pronoun resolution in…

John Hale

Dr. John Hale publishes paper in Neuropsychologia

Article Credit: Franklin Chronicles, Alan Flurry…

Dr. John Hale stands in front of poster hanging on column

Dr. John Hale presents poster at EMNLP 2019

Dr. John Hale presented a poster on "Text Genre & Training Data Size in Human-Like Parsing" along with Adhiguna Kuncoro (DeepMind & Oxford), Keith B.

Linguistics Lab

UGA Linguists Teach with Big Data

Collections of speech and text, known as corpora, have long played a key role in linguistics. Now with the help of a Learning Technologies Grant [from UGA's Center for Teaching and Learning], UGA linguists have access to an…

Contact Information

jthale@uga.edu
Office: Gilbert Hall 118A
Office Hours: Spring 2023 are Wednesday 3:30-5 via zoom, email for meeting ID
Phone: (706) 542-2115‬

Other Information

Professional Web site: Natural Language Processing c…
Other Affiliations: Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Brain Inspired AI at UGA

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