Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University
18 Seminary Pl, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1184, USA
huteng.dai[at]rutgers.edu

Huteng's thinking

My name is Huteng Dai (xu˨˩.tʰəŋ˧˥.tai˥˨) or Dai Huteng 戴虎腾 in Chinese order [the meaning of my name].

I'm a fifth-year PhD candidate at the Rutgers Department of Linguistics. I'm also affiliated with Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers Computational Linguistics Lab, and UCI Language Processing Group. I am currently a student organizer of Rutgers Phonology and Phonetics Research Group (PhonX).

I am a computational linguist and theoretical phonologist. My research program synthesizes linguistic theory and computational analysis to develop interpretable learning models that are mathematically well-grounded and succeed with real-world data. My recent projects investigate phonological acquisition from noisy input.

Research interests

Theoretical and methodological:
  • Computational Learning Theory
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  • Language acquisition
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  • Formal Language Theory
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  • Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic methods
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  • Information Theory
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  • Field methods
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    Empirical:
  • Phonotactics
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  • Turkic
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  • Harmony patterns
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  • Caucasian
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  • Tone and prosody
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  • Chinese
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    Recent activities:

    • 2023 April, paper with Connor Mayer (UCI), and Richard Futrell (UCI) "Rethinking representations: A log-bilinear model of phonotactics" got accepted by SCiL 2023. See you at UMass :)
    • 2023 Feb, I submitted a draft on exceptionality in phonotactic learning [Link]. Comments are welcome!
    • 2023 Spring, I will teach Introduction to Linguistic Theory for Rutgers Honors College.
    • 2022 Nov. 4, Invited talk at MIT Exp/Comp group [link].
    • 2022 Oct. 28, Invited talk at UCI QuantLang Lab
    • 2022 Oct. 21–23, I presented my third AMP talk at AMP 2022 @UCLA. [Slides][Code Demo]
    • 2022 Sept. 22–25, Workshop on Model Theoretic Representations in Phonology: Talk. Huteng Dai. "Learning phonological constraints in the presence of exceptions".
    • 2021 October 1–3, AMP 2021: Talk. Huteng Dai and Richard Futrell. "Learning Phonotactics in a Differentiable Framework of Subregular Languages" [Slides].
    • 2021 August 5, ACL SIGMORPHON 2021: Talk. Huteng Dai and Richard Futrell. "Simple induction of (deterministic) probabilistic finite-state automata for phonotactics by stochastic gradient descent" [Paper].

    Resources: