Background

“I started my academic career with Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam, but I always had a strong interest in language. For instance, I also studied Spanish Language and Culture, more or less as a hobby. When I studied, cognitive science started to become more and more of a thing and I participated in a “trial year” for the university for the Master that is now Brain and Cognitive Sciences. So in the end I graduated from Artificial Intelligence with a huge load of extra credits in cognitive science. Afterwards, I did a PhD in phonology and psycholinguistics at Utrecht University, and continued doing that as a postdoc. Then I moved to Munich and worked as a postdoc in phonetics. That was articulography, the science of the movement of the articulators, e.g. tongue and lips. In this project, we looked at the difference between French and German, and other languages that use consonant clusters, and how they are pronounced. This involves motor control, which is so physical it is almost no longer linguistics but cognitive science again. At some point I started to miss Artificial Intelligence, and then the position I have now came up.”

Formal modeling of language and cognition

“I now have a four-year assistant professorship, partially tied to the new bachelor CLC, but also with a component of 50% for research on Formal modeling of language and cognition. I am looking at the use of prosody to convey what information is new and what is given. Information structure is already a topic in linguistics, but also in logic. Epistemic logic, by definition, is about information exchange and how you formalize it. On the linguistics side, in phonetics or phonology, people don’t really investigate formal notions of what you can mark with accents or pitch contours. On the logic side, however, people know that something is marked with prosody, but they don’t describe or know what kind of markings there are. I want to bridge that gap.”

Interdisciplinary research

 “It is fashionable. That does not necessarily mean it’s good, but it became fashionable because there is something in it. For example, in a project proposal that I wrote with colleagues from other disciplines, communication scientists are researching: “How do we mark irony?” I’ as a phonologist, could say: “With prosody, but what is irony?” Sometimes there is too much to explore from the start on your own. But if a colleague from another discipline and you both have intuitions, you can start from those and both sharpen your intuitions. In my case particularly, it also allows the use of machine learning. A communication scientist knows how to annotate in a corpus how people mark irony, and a phonologist knows how to mark what interesting phonetic properties there are, and then you can employ machine learning to detect the correspondence. And because machine learning is about mapping one domain to another, it cannot be applied to one domain separately. But if you combine them, you can find a correspondence between a specific type of irony with a specific type of phonetic marking. So in general I would say interdisciplinary research is important because no one can know everything. Someone from another discipline might find parts of the question you’re asking easy. If such knowledge is there, it is good to connect it.”

Challenges

“Conducting interdisciplinary research is a lot of work. It should also not replace disciplinary studies, because without disciplines there could not be interdisciplinarity. Some people should understand enough of multiple disciplines and have broader knowledge, and other people should provide the depth and add to the knowledge of one discipline. Disciplines also have to be fed, sometimes you should just allow people to look at something in depth. These research groups should not be replaced by only interdisciplinary groups.”

Cognitive science in the Humanities

“I once read a definition of Humanities as ‘Products of the human mind.’ A book, for example, is definitely the product of the human mind, so literary studies fit that definition without a problem, but where does linguistics belong? Language is not a product of the human mind in the sense that we have invented it as some sort of creative project. It might be much more related to cognitive biases that we have and the way our brains work in interaction with the environment. If you don’t understand the cognitive component of language, then you can’t study the humanities component either. You would not be able to say what part of language is creative. For example, there are some things in poetry that you do explicitly, but some things are just inherent to language and based on a general cognitive bias. The poet is restricted by the language and the language might be restricted by cognition. And if you don’t know what that is, then you are in the dark.”

SMART

“The cognitive revolution in linguistics in the ‘50s argued that language is a cognitive thing, that it is some sort of algorithm that runs in the brain, and that we should also study it in that way. And I’m now talking about language, but the same approach can be applied to music. Maybe it is not just that language and music have a cognitive bias, but it might actually be the same bias to some extent. And you can probably extend this cognitive, algorithmic view to art: late Remko Scha, a professor of computational linguistics at the ILLC, and a pioneer in algorithmic art, approached art from this side and was making art without a human brain, but with algorithms. It would also be interesting to try this with other artful expressions, for instance to investigate to what extent the structures of a novel are present for cognitive reasons and to what extent they are artful. Elements of surprise, like flashbacks or flashforwards, are literary tools that have a cognitive effect: you cannot surprise a non-human, it has to have a brain and it has to have expectations.”

University of Amsterdam

“At the Dutch universities I worked at, and then especially Amsterdam, there is a lot of cooperation over institutes. The ILLC is part of the Humanities and Sciences and that is not just on paper; people are really working together. We are not competitors of the ACLC, we are working on the same topics from different viewpoints and we share the knowledge. Therefore, it is good that the UvA is such a big university. We can be good at many different things, that allows for a lot of collaboration.”

Future

 “I would like to stay in academia. Sometimes I doubt if I can, because it can be difficult to find a job and many jobs are temporary. You have to be lucky to find a job that is interesting for the specific thing you want to do.  But that is the only thing I don’t like about academia, the work itself I really like. There are things I am curious about, that I want to investigate, and then it is a luxury that I am enabled to do so. Then I also like that when I discover something, I can return it by teaching students. It’s a cliché, but it is almost like a hobby and a job at the same time.”