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Naomi Feldman 1401 Marie Mount Hall College Park, MD 20742 (301) 405-5800 nhf (at) umd (dot) edu

I'm an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland with a focus in computational psycholinguistics. My research uses methods from statistics, machine learning, and automatic speech recognition to formalize questions about how people learn and represent the structure of their language. I have primarily applied these methods to studying speech representations, investigating how people learn about the sounds of their language robustly from limited data and how that knowledge affects their subsequent perception of sounds. I have also looked at the problem of statistical learning more generally, asking how language learners can identify and rely on the aspects of their input that are most useful for learning. I'm affiliated with the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab, the Department of Computer Science, and the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. I'm an active member of the university's interdisciplinary Language Science community. I regularly interact with researchers from multiple other departments, multiple times a week, which makes it easy to develop research projects that cross disciplinary boundaries. You can read about some current projects here and here and some recent research findings here and here. Prospective graduate students: I can advise students through the graduate programs in linguistics, NACS (neuroscience and cognitive science), and computer science. I look at applications for all three programs. Linguistics and NACS are almost exactly equivalent to each other in terms of chances of admission, funding options, flexibility, etc. for students who want to work with me; just apply to the program whose coursework and degree you're most excited about, and list me as a possible advisor when you submit your application. Computer science is a bit different in that fit to a particular advisor is only weakly taken into account during the admissions process; list NLP first as an area of interest to make sure the CLIP lab sees your application. I'm always open to taking new students, so please apply if you're interested! You can also check whether you're eligible for any of the graduate school's application fee waivers. Undergraduates who want to do research: University of Maryland undergraduates who have interests in both language science and math/computer science are welcome to get in touch about research opportunities. Please include information about your background (e.g., your major/minor, year in the program, unofficial transcript, any other relevant experience) and what you're hoping to learn. See here, here, and here for examples of publications that undergraduates have co-authored in the past. I'm in a web comic! I play the role of "some girl" at Brown University.