14 Annu a L Repo
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20 t R l Repo A 14 Annu The Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language is an ARC funded centre of excellence (CE140100041). College of Asia and the Pacifc The Australian National Unviersity H.C. Coombs Building Fellows Road, Acton ACT 2601 Email: [email protected] Phone: (02) 6125 9376 www.dynamicsofanguage.edu.au www.facebook.com/CoEDL © ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language 2014 Design: Sculpt Communications ARC Centre of excellence for the Dynamics of language Annual Report 2014 table of contents Section 1: The Centre 7 Section 2: People 25 Section 3: Research 49 Section 4: Education, Training and Mentoring 75 Section 5: Outreach and Engagement 81 Section 6: Outputs 90 Section 7: Financials 103 Section 8: Performance indicators 105 7 one on I t C e S 01tHe CentRe HEADING HEADING Introducing the ARC Centre of excellence for the Dynamics of language 8 Using language is as natural as breathing, and almost as important, for using language transforms every aspect of human experience. But it has been extraordinarily diffcult to understand its evolution, diversifcation, and use: a vast array of incredibly different language systems are found across the planet, all representing different solutions to the problem of evolving a fexible, all-purpose communication system, and all in constant fux. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the To achieve this transformation of the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) will shift language sciences and the fow-on the focus of the language sciences from the translational outcomes for the public and long-held dominant view that language is a end-users, we have assembled a team which static and genetically constrained system — makes surprising and bold connections to a dynamic model where diversity, variation, between areas of research that until now plasticity and evolution, along with complex have not been connected: linguistics, interactions between language-learning and speech pathology, psychology, anthropology, perceptual and cognitive processes, lie at the philosophy, bioinformatics and robotics. heart of language and its investigation. CoEDL will address the most critical questions about language: How do languages (and other adaptive self-organising systems) evolve? How different can languages be? How do our brains acquire and process them? How can technologies deal with the complexity and enormous variability of language in its central role in human information processing? What can Australia do to increase its linguistic abilities at a time of increasingly multilingual demands in trade and information? t – 2014 OR p E R AL COEDL Annu CoeDl in 2015 9 Since the announcement in December 2013 that our bid was successful, and our formal commencement of operations in September 2014, we have put in place the key elements to meet our ambitious goals. Organisationally, we have set up our Administrative team and Advisory Committee; designed, built and moved into purpose-built new premises on the ANU campus; recruited our frst batch of PhD Students and Postdocs; held a number of workshops; and mapped out our more detailed research plans at one-year and three-year rhythms. We are now ready to move, in detail, to meet Second Language Learning, in mainstream, the scientifc and social challenges that multi-lingual, and disadvantaged contexts. we will address over the next six years. A Finally, our basic research in language central part of this is to enhance Australia‘s evolution together with cutting-edge linguistic wealth – an underrated aspect of experiments in robotics will feed the our informational resources - and to help development of new educational technologies secure the linguistic and cultural heritage of as well as assistive devices (language Indigenous and regional communities. We prostheses) for conversational support for will translate this shift in conceptual focus those with language loss or dementia. into transformations of central importance to society, the public and end-users, through using and developing New Technologies and upskilling Australia‘s research workforce. A smart country requires smart solutions that transform our economy away from manufacturing into a high-technology future. Research developments in this Centre will have signifcant technological fow-throughs, not least from the large amounts of language data collected from a range of languages. The consequent databases, in addition to the benefts of the new technology to develop them, will provide the type of Big Data essential for automatic speech recognition systems with educational and clinical applications. Centre research on language processing and learning will provide data for informing better literacy outcomes and adult HEADING HEADING Director’s welcome 10 As Director of the newly-established ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, it is a special pleasure to write this introduction to our frst annual report. To all our readers, I hope this frst report will convey the excitement, ambition and urgency of our goals, as well as a feeling for how, over this founding period, we have set the Centre up to take us there. This is where we bump against the tip of that giant iceberg that starts with the world’s 7,000+ languages, and goes down to the many billion more variants found at the level of individual variation. This includes the ever-present changes in how we speak as we learn our frst and subsequent languages, and, at the other end of life, as we lose the power to communicate. It is the goal of our Language is central to everything we do Centre to take these two facts – the stunning – from reading this report, to talking with diversity of the world’s linguistic systems, friends and family, to following the latest and the fact that they are dynamic systems scientifc or political developments. This constantly being reconfgured by their users makes CoEDL’s focus of interest, language – and forge a new approach to language and languages, something no one can afford which places diversity and dynamism at to ignore. Speaking and understanding come centre stage. so naturally to us, but this easy comfort Several tectonic shifts in the sciences of only lasts until we try to communicate with language make this approach timely. someone who doesn’t share our language, or suffer frustrating encounters with automatic One is a change in the way the science of voice recognition systems that don’t linguistics is conceived. Recent conceptual understand our words, or – an increasingly shifts (though by no means uncontroversial) common problem – witness the tragic decline move from an emphasis on a shared in older people’s ability to communicate ‘Universal Grammar’ with relatively superfcial with their carers, as a result of degenerative differences among languages, to a view that t – 2014 disorders like Alzheimer’s. At the level of emphasises the incredible diversity of the OR p E national and global politics, education or world’s languages on every level, and the R AL health, these communicative setbacks intricate two-way causal interactions between remind us that language is not always a language and thought, and language, perfectly tuned channel. society and culture. The great achievement COEDL Annu 11 of the Darwinian revolution in biology was A second conceptual shift, made more to show how the boundless diversity of the pressing by our realisation of how much world’s organisms can arise from general diversity has to tell us, is the looming principles of selection and their interaction catastrophe of language loss, proceeding with a wide range of ecological niches. more rapidly in Australia than on any other The ‘coevolutionary’ approach that informs continent. This mass extinction event is likely our Centre’s program aims to accomplish to see more than half the world’s languages a comparable revolution in the study of fall silent by the end of this century, many language. We are working towards a general completely unrecorded. Between them, the model of language evolution in which countries of our region contain around a ffth selection pressures give rise to a diversity of the world’s linguistic diversity: PNG ranks of linguistic structures. In this context, #1, Indonesia #2, India #4, Australia #5, the relevant ‘ecological’ settings may be Philippines #10 and Vanuatu #12 in terms cognitive, cultural, or technological. of numbers of local languages. Depending on the metric used, Vanuatu and PNG vie for To achieve this synthesis, CoEDL will supremacy as the world’s most linguistically approach the study of language through four diverse nations. interacting programs. Shape looks at the different ways languages are built, Learning Though there have been some notable examines what this means for the learning worldwide efforts over the last couple of of very different language types, Processing decades to record and safeguard this researches the way different language heritage, several key international programs structures demand different strategies are exhausting their funding with only for listening and thinking, and Evolution a fraction of the problem having been maps how a whole range of selectors build addressed. Renewing the impulse for and reshape each language and language the urgent effort to document the world’s variety. The varied backgrounds of our languages is a key part of the Centre’s brief. team of CIs span almost every feld needed A number of new academic appointments to build this new science of language – will be dedicated to the study of undescribed linguistics, psychology, computer science languages, and will develop new approaches and robotics, philosophy, anthropology, to archiving and technologies that speed speech therapy, and evolutionary and extend recording in the feld, and will bioinformatics. And the unique interweaving be developing global databases that can of four programs built into CoEDL’s structure be used for new types of comparison of is designed to maximise cross-fertilisation linguistic structures worldwide. around shared problems.