Welcome! I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan.
My thesis work is developing an algorithmic approach to phonology, in which phonological generalizations and representations are the result of learning algorithms grounded in independent psychological mechanisms. Informed by linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition, I use computational models as explicit, testable hypotheses. I evaluate my models on natural-language data, such as child-directed speech. In doing so, I compare the model’s behavior to linguistic analyses of the phenomenon and language acquisition results. Moreover, by taking an explicit, computational approach, my models make predictions, which I evaluate by comparing to human behavior in psycholinguistic experiments.
For my research, I have been awarded an NSF GRF, an NDSEG fellowship, and a Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement.
Prior research has contributed methods for choosing unlinked pairs of nodes to investigate further with a link prediction
method or experimental study, identifying subtle patterns in networks that are too infrequent to be discovered by frequency alone,
and for discovering errors and missing information in incomplete knowledge graphs.
Applications of this work include anomaly detection, suspicious behavior discovery, and city/urban planning, including projects with the City of Detroit on transportation planning.
Feel free to contact me at cbelth@umich.edu.
Publications
Recent Presentations