Dustin S. Stoltz- Finding the Body and Sound in Word Embeddings

When: 2023-03-20 14:00-16:00 (Tallinn time)
Where: online

The event is public via zoom: https://zoom.us/j/99209544202 Websites: https://dustinstoltz.com/

Abstract – Language is “grounded” in the body and physical world. Rather than an arbitrary system of signifiers, words are – at least in part – motivated by the sensorimotor regularities involved in navigating a social and material environment. As such, we should be able to recover such regularities by summarizing statistical patterns of word use – precisely the objective of neural language models. This talk discusses two works in-progress, both demonstrating the flexibility of word embedding methods, one focused on embodiment and the other focused on phonetics.

Additional information: Dustin S. Stoltz is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Notre Dame and is an affiliate of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He received a Master’s from Illinois State University in sociology, where he was a fellow of the Stevenson Center for Community and Economic Development. He also received his bachelor’s in sociology from Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. His master’s thesis explored trust, economic exchange, and meaning-making and was based on fieldwork conducted in Azerbaijan while he was serving in the U.S. Peace Corps. Prior to coming to Notre Dame, Dustin worked in the banking industry in Japan, which further informs his international perspective on issues in economic sociology.

Recent Awards: Clifford C. Clogg Scholarship (2017) to participate in the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research. Grant from the Summer Language Institute at the University of Chicago (in 2016) to study Turkish. Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from Indiana University (in 2015).