About

Eric Baković is a professor whose work is centered on linguistics and cognitive science. His research involves understanding the interface between grammatical tone and morphophonology, as well as exploring functional pressures and linguistic typology. He has advised numerous PhD students and is actively involved in academic mentoring, with a focus on areas related to linguistics, cognitive science, and language processing.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Epistemology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy
• Natural Language Processing
• Art
• Speech recognition
• Psychology
• Mathematics
• Physics

Selected publications

• Weak determinism and the computational consequences of interaction

  Natural Language & Linguistic Theory · 2024-01-03 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Recent work has claimed that (non-tonal) phonological patterns are subregular (Heinz 2011a,b, 2018; Heinz and Idsardi 2013), occupying a delimited proper subregion of the regular functions—the weakly deterministic (WD) functions (Heinz and Lai 2013; Jardine 2016). Whether or not it is correct (McCollum et al. 2020a), this claim can only be properly assessed given a complete and accurate definition of WD functions. We propose such a definition in this article, patching unintended holes in Heinz and Lai’s (2013) original definition that we argue have led to the incorrect classification of some phonological patterns as WD. We start from the observation that WD patterns share a property that we call unbounded semiambience , modeled after the analogous observation by Jardine (2016) about non-deterministic (ND) patterns and their unbounded circumambience . Both ND and WD functions can be broken down into compositions of deterministic (subsequential) functions (Elgot and Mezei 1965; Heinz and Lai 2013) that read an input string from opposite directions; we show that WD functions are those for which these deterministic composands do not interact in a way that is familiar from the theoretical phonology literature. To underscore how this concept of interaction neatly separates the WD class of functions from the strictly more expressive ND class, we provide analyses of the vowel harmony patterns of two Eastern Nilotic languages, Maasai and Turkana, using bimachines, an automaton type that represents unbounded bidirectional dependencies explicitly. These analyses make clear that there is interaction between deterministic composands when (and only when) the output of a given input element of a string is simultaneously dependent on information from both the left and the right: ND functions are those that involve interaction, while WD functions are those that do not.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A formal typology of process interactions

  Phonological Data and Analysis · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Some phonologically significant generalizations result from processes, often formalized as rewrite rules, while others result from interactions among independently motivated processes, often formalized in terms of serial ordering. We adopt these general formalizations of processes and interactions to address two questions. One is the interaction question: what are all the possible forms of interaction between two processes? The other is the opacity question: what makes an interaction between two processes opaque? We show that these questions are best addressed with a rigorous algebraic formalization of processes and their pairwise interactions, describing the complete formal typology of process interactions and identifying the formal properties of those interactions that lead to different types of opacity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Faithfulness and underspecification

  Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology · 2023-05-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This work is about two ‘generation problems’ for classic Optimality Theory, chain shifts and saltations. The issues for OT posed by traditional analyses of chain shifts and saltations have led to various embellishments of the classic theory, typically in the form of novel constraint types. Reiss (2021a,b) proposes a general solution to the problem of chain shifts and saltations that relies more directly on different assumptions about representations than about constraints. Specifically, Reiss assumes that underlying representations may be underspecified, and that a map ‘counts’ as a chain shift or as a saltation so long as the surface alternants from a uniform underlying representation match the respective observed alternants. We report here on three results from our ongoing formal assessment of Reiss’s proposed solution.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Phonological Abstraction in The Mental Lexicon

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-02-14 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In this chapter, we examine the nature of the long-term memory representation of the pronunciations of words. A fundamental question concerns how abstract these representations are vis à vis the physical manifestation of words, both as gestures and as physical percepts. We consider this question and related issues within the traditions of linguistic cognition and generative phonology. We first explore the general nature of abstraction, and then review the arguments in generative phonology for positing that the units of speech stored in long-term memory (so called ‘underlying forms’) abstract away from many phonetic details. Motivations for concepts such as phonemes and distinctive phonological features are given. We then visit the open question regarding how abstract underlying forms may be allowed to be. We conclude by highlighting the contributions that evidence from neuroscience and sign language linguistics brings to these issues of phonological abstraction in the mental lexicon.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On the proper treatment of weak determinism: Subsequentiality and simultaneous application in phonological maps

  2021 · 3 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics
  • Computer Science
  Publisher

• Comparing Positional Licensing Patterns in HG and OT

  Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology · 2021-05-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Positional licensing refers to the observation that elements (e.g. particular feature values or feature value combinations) can be limited to specific positions (e.g. syllable onsets, initial syllables, stressed syllables, etc.). Positional licensing patterns have been analyzed using either positional markedness or positional faithfulness constraints in OT and HG. In this paper we demonstrate that the predictions of OT and HG diverge in deep but structured ways once there are more than two licensing positions. We propose an account for this structured divergence based on 3-position systems, and confirm the validity of that account with an analysis of 4-position systems. We also describe how conjoined constraints impact positional licensing patterns, and in doing so provide a counter-example to a claim made in our previous work (Mai & Baković 2020).

  PublisherDOI

• Speakers enhance contextually confusable words

  2020 · 36 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Computer Science

  Recent work has found evidence that natural languages are shaped by pressures for efficient communication — e.g. the more contextually predictable a word is, the fewer speech sounds or syllables it has (Piantadosi et al. 2011). Research on the degree to which speech and language are shaped by pressures for effective communication — robustness in the face of noise and uncertainty — has been more equivocal. We develop a measure of contextual confusability during word recognition based on psychoacoustic data. Applying this measure to naturalistic speech corpora, we find evidence suggesting that speakers alter their productions to make contextually more confusable words easier to understand.

  PublisherDOI

• Unbounded circumambient patterns in segmental phonology

  Phonology · 2020 · 100 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  We present an empirical challenge to Jardine's (2016) assertion that only tonal spreading patterns can be unbounded circumambient, meaning that the determination of a phonological value may depend on information that is an unbounded distance away on both sides. We focus on a demonstration that the ATR harmony pattern found in Tutrugbu is unbounded circumambient, and we also cite several other segmental spreading processes with the same general character. We discuss implications for the complexity of phonology and for the relationship between the explanation of typology and the evaluation of phonological theories.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cumulative constraint interaction and the equalizer of OT and HG

  Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology · 2020-05-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We show that, in general, Optimality Theory (OT) grammars containing a restricted family of locally-conjoined constraints (Smolensky 2006) make the same typological predictions as corresponding Harmonic Grammar (HG) grammars. We provide an intuition for the generalization using a simple constrast and neutralization typology, as well as a formal proof. This demonstration adds structure to claims about the (non)equivalence of HG and OT with local conjunction (Legendre et al. 2006, Pater 2016) and provides a tool for understanding how different sets of constraints lead to the same typological predictions in HG and OT.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Questioning to Resolve Transduction Problems

  ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2020-01-06 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Elgot & Mezei (1965) show that non-deterministic regular functions (NDRFs) 𝚽 are compositions ρ ⚬ λ of two contradirectional subsequential functions (SSQs), where λ is unbounded lookahead for ρ. Such decompositions facilitate the identification of processes that require supra-SSQ expressivity. We use concepts adapted from decision theory to outline a set of necessary and sufficient properties for a composition ρ ⚬ λ to define a non-SSQ NDRF 𝚽. These conditions define a set of functions between the IF-WDRFs (McCollum et al. 2018, Hao & Andersson 2019) and proper NDRFs, organized in terms of a precise notion of the degree of lookahead that λ provides for ρ.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Anna Mai

  Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

  7 shared

• Paul de Lacy

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  6 shared

• Eric Meinhardt

  University of California, San Diego

  6 shared

• Adam McCollum

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  4 shared

• Edward Keer

  4 shared

• Bożena Pająk

  Finnish Medical Society Duodecim

  4 shared

• John Alderete

  Simon Fraser University

  2 shared

• Leon Bergen

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  Rutgers University New Brunswick

  2000

• B.A., Linguistics

  University of California Santa Cruz

  1993