Ph.D. Candidate, U. Alberta Department of Linguistics
Research
I'm currently computing a dissertation about reduced speech in the Buckeye Speech Corpus. I'm using various modelling techniques, especially mixed-effects and Random Forest modelling, to try to find out when and how people drop sounds or seconds from natural speech.
In the past, I've used statistical models to look at eye movements during reading, created ad-hoc mathematical tools for computing sentiment in written corpora, helped developed an algorithm to find cognate sets across several related languages, implemented a phonology-learning model by modifying OTSoft, and done a tiny bit of research on Okanagan Salish using secondary sources.
In the future, I hope to spend my time exploring linguistic data by borrowing methods from data mining, and developing clean, simple, and beautiful interactive visualization tools for large collections of naturalistic language.
Teaching
I'm teaching LING 101 (B1), Introduction to Linguistic Analysis, in Winter 2012.
Registered students will soon find course materials on eClass
I taught LING 101 (Introduction to Linguistics) three times from Summer 2010 to the end of Winter 2011, and LING 100 (Introduction to Human Language - now LING 102) in the Spring of 2008.
Publications & Talks
2011. Dilts, P., Baayen, R.H. & Tucker, B.V. Word duration and segment deletion as measures of reduction in a corpus of spontaneous speech. Poster presented at the 161st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Seattle, Washington, May 24, 2011
2010. Dilts, P. & Tessier, A-M. A Computational implementation of Error-Selective Learning. Poster Presentation at the Workshop on Computational Modelling of Sound Pattern Acquisition Workshop. University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, February 13 (my birthday!) 2010
2009. Dilts, P. Libben, G. & Baayen, R.H. A Corpus Analysis of Frequency Effects on Eye-Movements in Sentence Context. Presentation at AACL 2009. University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, October 10, 2009
2009. Dilts, P. Good nouns, bad nouns: what the corpus says and what native speakers think. In Language and Computers 71, St. Th. Gries, S. Wulff, M. Davies eds. pp. 103-117.
2009. Gries, St. Th., Newman, J., Shaoul, C. & Dilts, P. N-grams and the clustering of genres. (paper presented at the workshop Corpus, colligation, register variation at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, March 6, 2009)
2008. Dilts, P. Good nouns, bad nouns: what the corpus says and what native speakers think. Presentation at AACL 2008. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. March 14, 2008,
2007. Kondrak, G., Beck, D. & Dilts, P. Creating a Comparative Dictionary of Totonac-Tepehua. Proc. ACL SIGMORPHON '07, 134-141.
2006. Dilts, P., & Newman, J. A note on quantifying "good" and "bad" prosodies. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2 (2), 233-242.
2006. Dilts, P. Quantifying "good" and "bad" prosodies. Presentation at the Alberta Conference on Linguistics. Banff, Alberta, October 21, 2006.
2006. Dilts, P. An analysis of the Okanagan "middle" marker -m. Presentation at the 41st International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages. University of Victoria, British Columbia, August 11, 2006.
2006. Dilts, P. An anlysis of the Okanagan "middle" marker -m. Papers for the 41st International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages. Kiyota, M., Thompson, J.J. & Yamane-Tanaka N. (eds.) University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics 18, 77-98.