Humanities Student Spotlight:

Scaling the Heights of Linguistic Theory in Bergen, Norway, Home to Mount Fløyen

"The Sixth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories" recently took place in Bergen, Norway, and fourth-year undergraduate student John Pate was there. Pate attended the peer-reviewed international conference alongside his faculty mentor, Professor Detmar Meurers, with whom he published and presented a coauthored work entitled, "Refining Syntactic Categories Using Local Contexts – Experiments in Unlexicalized PCFG Parsing." Supported by the Research Council of Norway, and by a grant from the Humanities Faculty at the University of Bergen, the workshop provides for the exchange of ideas and discussion of cutting edge research for linguists from all corners of the globe, and spotlights exceptionally talented young researchers and scholars like Pate.

Pate's travel to Norway was funded in part by Department of Linguistics and College of Humanities grants that support undergraduate participation in professional conferences for the purpose of presenting original work. One highlight of the trip for Pate was the opportunity to meet several computational corpus linguists to get a sense of what the field is like outside of Ohio State.

Currently a senior honors student pursuing majors in linguistics and philosophy, Pate is taking advantage of the recently established dual degree program option in linguistics in order to complete his undergraduate degree program and earn an MA in a shortened period of time. The combined BA/MA program is designed for gifted students in multiple disciplines who have fulfilled certain university and arts and sciences requirements and who wish to proceed posthaste to graduate work.

Pate is active as an undergraduate student research mentor who readily shares his experiences with peers. In addition to his interest in computational and psycho linguistics, he has conducted research in psychology as an undergraduate student and gained valuable research knowledge by working in the Developmental Language and Cognition Lab in the Department of Psychology. As a member of the University Collegium, a select group of exceptional students cultivated for competition for the most prestigious national scholarships, Pate is among OSU's best and brightest.

For the allure of Mount Fløyen, or because Bergen is more than a stone's throw from Middletown, Ohio (his hometown), Pate took a well-deserved break following the conference, staying a few days to hike in the mountains, take a train ride to nearby Voss, and to experience the magic of the city of Bergen in the winter.