grant

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The University of Maryland has received a nearly $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that will support efforts to improve the way handwritten documents from the premodern Islamicate world—primarily in Persian and Arabic—are turned into machine-readable text for use by academics or the public. 

Assistant Professor Matthew Thomas Miller and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Parkes Allen, both of the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, will work with researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), led by computer scientist Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, on the innovative humanities-computer science collaboration. UCSD received its own $300,000 award.    

Over three years, the researchers will work in the domain of handwritten text recognition, which are methods designed to automatically read a diversity of human handwriting types with high levels of accuracy. 

“This work has the potential to remove substantial roadblocks for digital study of the premodern Islamicate written tradition and would be really transformative for future studies of these manuscripts,” Miller said. “We are very grateful to the NSF for its support.” 

This latest research proposal builds on a number of ongoing efforts to develop open-source technology to expand digital access to manuscripts and books from the premodern Islamicate world in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu; Miller currently leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers on a $1.75 million grant from the Mellon Foundation as well as a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

There are hundreds of thousands—perhaps even millions—of premodern Islamicate books and manuscripts spanning over 1,500 years, from the 7th–19th centuries, forming perhaps the largest archive of cultural production of the premodern world. Scanning and digitization efforts over the last decade have made images of Islamicate manuscripts in a large number of collections available to the public. However, they remain mostly “locked” for digital search and manipulation because the text has not been transcribed into digital text.  

The task is made more difficult by the diversity and intricacy of many Arabic manuscripts, said Allen, who is a historian of early modern Ottoman religious and cultural history. They may be written alongside diagonal notes, annotations and corrections, in multiple colors and “hands.” 

Under the NSF grant, researchers will develop new techniques that remove the need for extensive manual—or human—labor, a method known as “unsupervised” transcription. Eventually, the tools under development will produce models that will be able to automatically transcribe large quantities of Persian and Arabic script in a multitude of different styles with substantially higher degrees of accuracy than is currently possible.

“The Arabic script tradition is so extensive and so broad,” Allen said. “People need to be able to read these manuscripts, search within them, and integrate them into their research.” 

Image: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. or. oct. 3759

We Have an Artist on Our Team

In addition to an oceanographer, climatologist, data scientist, and outreach educator, we are lucky to have an artist as a Co-PI (primary investigator) on our team.

Cy Keener installing his Light Ice Mass Balance Buoy 100 miles north of Barrow Point on the Arctic Ocean. Photo by John Woods

Cy Keener is an interdisciplinary artist who uses environmental sensing and kinetic sculpture to record and represent the natural world. He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Emerging Technology in the Department of Art. His work includes a range of data-based installations to visualize diverse phenomena including sea ice, wind, rain and ocean waves. He received a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University, and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Cy has completed commissioned installations at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Stanford University, Suyama Space in Seattle, and the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas.

Check out short videos of Cy's work on Vimeo.

Listen to Embedded.fm Episode 365: Barbed Wire Fence and Great Wifi with Cy Keener

Digital Ice Core re-presents ambient light readings in the ice and ocean at full scale. photo from https://19.piksel.no/2019/11/21/digital-ice-core/

The image above was the piece Cy created after the March 2019 IABP trip to Utqiagvik, Alaska to deploy RGB light and temperature sensors through the sea ice. The data was shared real-time through satellite technology and was displayed as light in the Digital Ice Core. This light sculpture re-presents ambient light readings in the ice and ocean below at full scale, recorded at noon local time between April 5 and June 14, 2019. The sculpture enables viewers to experience a critical but vanishing aspect of the Arctic environment through open source electronics and data.

The Light Ice Mass Balance buoy Cy deployed on April 3, 2022 on this trip, will inspire another art installation in the coming year or so.

Cy Keener assembling ice cadet buoys before deploying them.

By Maryland Today Staff 

While the world contended with a pandemic, social media platforms and other sources spewed billions of misleading health messages at users—more than 3.8 billion times on Facebook over the course of a year, according to one study—a dynamic that University of Maryland researchers and their colleagues say can lead to adverse public health outcomes ranging from mistrust in reliable information sources to deaths from disease.

Now, these risk communication experts in the Department of Communication and at the University of Georgia (UGA) are collaborating with researchers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop and test messaging strategies that can help overcome misinformation during public health emergencies.

Supported by a three-year, nearly $225,000 award from the FDA, communication Professor Brooke Fisher Liu and Yan Jin, professor of public relations and Georgia Athletic Association professor at UGA, will develop and test message strategies concerning vital health information that can help keep people safe.

“Past research found a clear link between COVID-19 misinformation exposure and vaccine hesitancy,” said Liu, the project’s principal investigator. “Research also connects misinformation exposure to lower compliance with government health and safety guidance. In short, misinformation is just as great of a threat to public health as the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, but our knowledge is limited on how to combat misinformation.”

The researchers will be among the first to explore how public health misinformation can be corrected through strategic risk communication and what methods work best in thwarting misinformation. They will conduct two large-scale online experiments on how messages containing misinformation and various types of corrective responses are interpreted by U.S. adults.

“This project exemplifies the importance and promising future for more collaborative risk and crisis communication research across universities and with the government to provide theory-driven, evidenced-based insights to protect public health and safety,” said Jin, co-principal investigator.

Liu and Jin’s research collaborations date back to 2001, when they both studied in the graduate program at the Missouri School of Journalism. Now they are joined by graduate research assistants Tori McDermott from UMD, and Xuerong Lu from UGA.

In addition to the experimental results, the research team will also provide a targeted deep-dive analysis of previous research, and will recommend best practices for how public health agencies can combat health misinformation for current and future threats.

This article was adapted from a news release by the University of Georgia.

Support for research on constraints on movement, and on exceptive constructions.

Congratulations to Adam Liter and to Maria Polinsky, whose work has earned new support from the National Science Foundation. Adam has received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for work with his supervisor, Jeff Lidz, on “Subjacency, the Empty Category Principle, and the nature of constraints on phrase movement.” Masha is the recipient of a Collaborative Research Award on “Variation in exceptive structures,” on how languages express thoughts like ‘everybody laughed except you,' a project on which Hisao Kurokami has already begun to work. See the abstracts below.

Adam Liter and Jeffrey Lidz, BCS #2116270, Subjacency, the Empty Category Principle, and the nature of constraints on phrase movement

In general, it is possible to form a question by 'moving' a wh-phrase like "who” or "which boy" out of a seemingly arbitrary number of clauses, as in "Who did Allie say that Amy saw?", "Who did Alicia hear that Allie said that Amy saw?", and so on. In these questions, "who" is the logical object of "saw" yet appears at the beginning of the sentence. However, there are certain syntactic environments, commonly called 'islands,' in which question formation is not possible. A question like "Who did the book by delight everyone?"--whose intended meaning is 'who is the person such that the book by that person delighted everyone'--sounds unnatural to speakers of English, suggesting that it is not a possible question despite having a reasonable meaning. Some linguists have claimed that these constraints disappear when the offending structure is elided, such as in a sentence like "Amy said that the book by someone delighted everyone, but I don't remember who". Such sentences sound a bit more natural to speakers of English, but their status isn't entirely clear. This dissertation project will advance linguistic theory by using recent experimental techniques to ascertain whether such sentences are grammatical. In advancing the field, this project will also support education and diversity by training an undergraduate research assistant in these experimental techniques, scientific thinking, and statistical analysis.

Using behavioral methods, this doctoral dissertation project probes the link between speakers' reported judgments and their sensitivity to structure in questions with and without ellipsis. The goal is to determine whether the same principles apply to dependencies involving ellipsis as those that do not, with the longer term goal of identifying the computational principles governing syntactic locality. More generally, the project addresses the consequences of mismatches between reported acceptability and subliminal sensitivity to structure in acceptability judgments.

Maria Polinsky, BCS #2116344, Variation in exceptive structures

All languages are able to express universal statements, even though we realize that they are seldom literally true. Consequently, languages also have means of expressing exceptions to such generalizations, via exceptive constructions. English examples include "Everybody but Sandy laughed" and "Everybody laughed except Sandy". Linguistic means of expressing exclusion have received modest attention from philosophers of language and semanticists, whose focus has been primarily on English. Beyond that small body of work, little is known about exceptive constructions across the world's languages: how they are built, what their distribution is within individual languages and across languages, and how they compare to other constructions expressing comparison or contrast. This research project fills this gap as the first cross-linguistic investigation of lexical, morphological, and syntactic properties of the construction. Understanding exceptive constructions allows linguists to create better theories of language structure and to predict the range of variation in natural languages; it helps computer scientists build better parsing models; it gives language educators new dimensions that should be emphasized in language teaching, and it provides cultural anthropologists with additional tools to study societal (dis)similarities in the concept of exclusion. 

This research project employs methodologies from linguistic typology, theoretical syntax, and formal semantics to carry out in-depth investigations of exceptive constructions in a wide range of the world's languages. The project aims for maximum linguistic coverage by using sampling techniques of modern linguistic typology. Theoretically, the project addresses a range of questions that arise from the empirical findings. In particular, it analyzes the contrast between free and connected exceptives, phrasal and clausal exceptives, and coordinated and subordinated exceptives. The project develops diagnostics that reliably identify the different types of exceptives and identifies independent linguistic properties that correlate with these different types of exceptives in a language. Therefore, it allows researchers to predict the type of exceptive constructions in an individual language. Beyond developing a picture of exceptive structure cross-linguistically, the project has notable implications for current theories of ellipsis. The project provides data on low-resource and endangered languages and highlights the importance of linguistic diversity for a complete understanding of the human language system.