Theory Group

The Theory Group is a student faculty research group which includes students of all levels working together with a faculty advisor, Jim Rogers. Our broad focus is on problems in the area of formal language theory (such as is introduced in CS-380 Theory of Computation, although you don't necessarily need to have taken CS-380 to participate). Our specific focus is on computational approaches to studying natural languages.

Our current project is studying the formal complexity of stress patterns that occur in the words of human languages with the goal of gaining insight into the abstract nature of the mechanisms which humans use to recognize them when listening, to generate them when speaking and to learn them.

Previous projects involved developing parsing algorithms for Multi-Dimensional Grammars and Automata, generalizations of Context-Free Grammars which have additional descriptive power sufficient to capture many of the constructions occurring in natural languages that cannot be described by CFGs.

More detailed descriptions of our current projects are available either on the projects pages by following the specific links in the navigation menu.

People

Currently there are three students and one faculty advisor working in the theory group.

• Dakotah Lambert A first year, CS Major.
• Margaret Fero A second year, Theatre Arts and CLL double Major.
• Jeremy Hurst A fourth year, CS Major, Physics Minor.
• Sean Wibel A fourth year, Math major, CS minor
• Jim Rogers The faculty advisor.

Past Participants

• David Wellcome 2011
• Aaron Weeden 2011
• Gil Bailey 2010
• Nate Smith 2009
• Matt Edlefsen 2009
• Molly Visscher 2009
• Dylan Leeman 2008
• Nathan Myers 2008
• David Brown 2006.
• Colin Kern 2006.
• Alex Lemann 2006.
• Tom Weiss-Lehman 2006.
• Greg Sandstrom 2005.
• Ian Kelly 2004.

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