UB Center for Cognitive Science

Research Groups

Last Update: 16 September 2008

Note: or material is highlighted

Group Day Time Location Contact

Center for Cognitive Science colloquium series Wednesdays 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. 280 Park William J. Rapaport

Computational Psycholinguistics Lab

Read and discuss current computational and psycholinguistic papers, as well as ongoing projects being done by various students in the lab.
Wednesdays 12:00 noon - 2:00 p.m. 222-224 Clemens Douglas Roland

Ontology Research Group

The Ontology Research Group is part of the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. It currently has two sub-units:

The Ontology, Logic and Technology Unit is engaged in foundational ontology research and in ontology content development especially in the biomedical domain.
The Referent Tracking Unit carries out fundamental and applied research and software development in the domain of Electronic Health Records and other data resources in the biomedical domain.

The vision of ORG is one according to which the data generated in the course of biomedical research will form a single, cumulative, and algorithmically processable whole, which will yield a better understanding of the complex multi-dimensional processes underlying human disease.
The mission of ORG is to create and apply high-quality ontologies that can contribute to realizing this vision in ways that support translational research and clinical care.
varies varies varies Barry Smith

Psycholinguistics Laboratory

The research in this lab focuses on the mental representations and processing mechanisms involved in the comprehension of sentences and discourses.
A primary goal in understanding a sentence is figuring out the who-did-what-to-whom information that it conveys. However, there are many possible sources for this sort of information. The questions we are currently engaged in answering include:

What sources of event participant information do readers and hearers use in understanding a sentence?
When is event participant information used in developing structural and semantic representations for sentences and discourses?
How much participant information is lexically encoded?
What is the discourse status of unexpressed participant information and how is it used in anaphora resolution?
What is the nature of the syntactic representions that lead to syntactic persistance in the language production of bilinguals?
To what degree is syntactic persistance in comprehension due to general principles of learning as opposed to language specific representations and processes?
Is semantic meaning reduceable to or dissociable from associations?
What is the organization of participant role information in the mental lexicon?

These investigations make use of a number of methodologies including fixed-head and head-mounted eye tracking, on-line sentence comprehension and priming paradigms, corpora studies, computational and probabalistic models of language processing and learning, and language production paradigms. We also have ongoing collaborations with members of the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory.
Mondays 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. 366 Park Gail Mauner
645-0219

Referent Tracking Unit

The mission of the Referent Tracking Unit (RTU) is to carry out fundamental and applied research and software application development with the goal of allowing better use to be made of both (1) data pertaining to particular patients residing in EHRs on the one hand, and (2) patient-independent data of the type that is typically found in biomedical research databases on the other. This is achieved through a new paradigm: Referent Tracking. The work of the RTU is designed to allow biomedical and bioinformatics researchers to exploit the wealth of information that is stored in patient data repositories. At the same time it is designed to offer clinicians new and higher quality types of evidence for the appropriateness of given diagnoses or therapeutic hypotheses through seamless access to the research data generated by biologists and bio-informaticians.
varies varies varies Werner Ceusters

Semantic Typology Lab

Linguistic categorization is the representation of (objective or subjective) reality in terms of semantic categories of language—categories expressed by words, phrases, and utterances. Semantic typology—the crosslinguistic study of linguistic categorization, a young subdiscipline of linguistics—asks to what extent and in what respects languages differ in how they represent reality. The resources that languages use to express the same idea can vary considerably. Even in contemporary linguistics, there is widespread disagreement over the extent of this variation. This disagreement is the result of sparseness of empirical evidence combined with the controvery between universalists and relativists. Relativism is the idea that cognition is to a significant extent culture-specific, learned, and social rather than individual. Conversely, universalism assumes that cognition—or at least core components of it—is culture-independent and possibly innate. Thus, the relativism-universalism debate is one contemporary manifestation of the age-old nature-nurture debate. Along with cognitive psychology and the study of linguistic and cognitive development, semantic typology opens one of the few empirical windows onto the relativism-universalism debate.

The meetings are open to anybody with an interest in semantic typology. Any research in or relevant to semantic typology—yours or that of others, existing or future—is a possible topic of discussion.
probably Fridays probably 11:00 A.M. - 12:30 P.M. probably 617 Baldy Jürgen Bohnemeyer

SNePS Research Group (SNeRG)

The long term goal of the SNePS Research Group is to understand the nature of intelligent cognitive processes by developing and experimenting with computational cognitive agents that are able to use and understand natural language, reason, act, and solve problems in a wide variety of domains.
The principal research area of the Group is knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) in support of natural-language competent autonomous agents. This includes research in: logics for KRR; natural-language understanding and generation; cognitive architectures; acting formalisms; belief change; models of time, self, and other agents.
The group is widely known for its development of the SNePS knowledge representation, reasoning, and acting system, and Cassie, its computerized cognitive agent.
click here for speaker schedule
Thursdays 1:00 - 3:00 P.M. 224 Bell Stuart C. Shapiro

Group	Day	Time	Location	Contact
Center for Cognitive Science colloquium series	Wednesdays	2:00 - 4:00 p.m.	280 Park	William J. Rapaport
Computational Psycholinguistics Lab Read and discuss current computational and psycholinguistic papers, as well as ongoing projects being done by various students in the lab.	Wednesdays	12:00 noon - 2:00 p.m.	222-224 Clemens	Douglas Roland
Ontology Research Group The Ontology Research Group is part of the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. It currently has two sub-units: The Ontology, Logic and Technology Unit is engaged in foundational ontology research and in ontology content development especially in the biomedical domain. The Referent Tracking Unit carries out fundamental and applied research and software development in the domain of Electronic Health Records and other data resources in the biomedical domain. The vision of ORG is one according to which the data generated in the course of biomedical research will form a single, cumulative, and algorithmically processable whole, which will yield a better understanding of the complex multi-dimensional processes underlying human disease. The mission of ORG is to create and apply high-quality ontologies that can contribute to realizing this vision in ways that support translational research and clinical care.	varies	varies	varies	Barry Smith
Psycholinguistics Laboratory The research in this lab focuses on the mental representations and processing mechanisms involved in the comprehension of sentences and discourses. A primary goal in understanding a sentence is figuring out the who-did-what-to-whom information that it conveys. However, there are many possible sources for this sort of information. The questions we are currently engaged in answering include: What sources of event participant information do readers and hearers use in understanding a sentence? When is event participant information used in developing structural and semantic representations for sentences and discourses? How much participant information is lexically encoded? What is the discourse status of unexpressed participant information and how is it used in anaphora resolution? What is the nature of the syntactic representions that lead to syntactic persistance in the language production of bilinguals? To what degree is syntactic persistance in comprehension due to general principles of learning as opposed to language specific representations and processes? Is semantic meaning reduceable to or dissociable from associations? What is the organization of participant role information in the mental lexicon? These investigations make use of a number of methodologies including fixed-head and head-mounted eye tracking, on-line sentence comprehension and priming paradigms, corpora studies, computational and probabalistic models of language processing and learning, and language production paradigms. We also have ongoing collaborations with members of the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory.	Mondays	1:00 - 2:30 p.m.	366 Park	Gail Mauner 645-0219
Referent Tracking Unit The mission of the Referent Tracking Unit (RTU) is to carry out fundamental and applied research and software application development with the goal of allowing better use to be made of both (1) data pertaining to particular patients residing in EHRs on the one hand, and (2) patient-independent data of the type that is typically found in biomedical research databases on the other. This is achieved through a new paradigm: Referent Tracking. The work of the RTU is designed to allow biomedical and bioinformatics researchers to exploit the wealth of information that is stored in patient data repositories. At the same time it is designed to offer clinicians new and higher quality types of evidence for the appropriateness of given diagnoses or therapeutic hypotheses through seamless access to the research data generated by biologists and bio-informaticians.	varies	varies	varies	Werner Ceusters
Semantic Typology Lab Linguistic categorization is the representation of (objective or subjective) reality in terms of semantic categories of language—categories expressed by words, phrases, and utterances. Semantic typology—the crosslinguistic study of linguistic categorization, a young subdiscipline of linguistics—asks to what extent and in what respects languages differ in how they represent reality. The resources that languages use to express the same idea can vary considerably. Even in contemporary linguistics, there is widespread disagreement over the extent of this variation. This disagreement is the result of sparseness of empirical evidence combined with the controvery between universalists and relativists. Relativism is the idea that cognition is to a significant extent culture-specific, learned, and social rather than individual. Conversely, universalism assumes that cognition—or at least core components of it—is culture-independent and possibly innate. Thus, the relativism-universalism debate is one contemporary manifestation of the age-old nature-nurture debate. Along with cognitive psychology and the study of linguistic and cognitive development, semantic typology opens one of the few empirical windows onto the relativism-universalism debate. The meetings are open to anybody with an interest in semantic typology. Any research in or relevant to semantic typology—yours or that of others, existing or future—is a possible topic of discussion.	probably Fridays	probably 11:00 A.M. - 12:30 P.M.	probably 617 Baldy	Jürgen Bohnemeyer
SNePS Research Group (SNeRG) The long term goal of the SNePS Research Group is to understand the nature of intelligent cognitive processes by developing and experimenting with computational cognitive agents that are able to use and understand natural language, reason, act, and solve problems in a wide variety of domains. The principal research area of the Group is knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) in support of natural-language competent autonomous agents. This includes research in: logics for KRR; natural-language understanding and generation; cognitive architectures; acting formalisms; belief change; models of time, self, and other agents. The group is widely known for its development of the SNePS knowledge representation, reasoning, and acting system, and Cassie, its computerized cognitive agent. click here for speaker schedule	Thursdays	1:00 - 3:00 P.M.	224 Bell	Stuart C. Shapiro