https://ELF-Lab.github.io/ Recent content on ELF-Lab Hugo en-us Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ELF-Lab.github.io/contact/ Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ELF-Lab.github.io/contact/ <p>If you have any questions or inquiries about current studies, research, joining our team or anything else related to the lab do not hesitate to reach out via email!</p> <p>ELF lab email: <a href="mailto:elf.lab@ubc.ca">elf.lab@ubc.ca</a></p> https://ELF-Lab.github.io/members/ Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ELF-Lab.github.io/members/ <h2 id="director">Director</h2> <table> <thead> <tr> <th></th> <th></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td><strong>Dr. Christopher Hammerly</strong> is Director of ELF-Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UBC. He is a member (descendent) of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota of mixed Anishinaabe and Norwegian American descent. His work primarily focuses on his ancestral language Anishinaabemowin. He uses a variety of methods to understand the cognitive representations and processes underpinning human knowledge of syntax (sentence structure) and morphology (word structure), including formal theories, fieldwork, computational models, and experimental tasks.</td> <td><img src="https://ELF-Lab.github.io/images/ChrisHeadshot.jpeg" alt="Chris Hammerly Headshot"></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <h2 id="graduate-students">Graduate Students</h2> <table> <thead> <tr> <th></th> <th></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td><strong>Anna Stacey</strong> is an incoming PhD student at UBC Linguistics and former MA student (completed 2025). She works on technological developments for Indigenous languages. She got her BSc in Computer Science and Linguistics from UManitoba in 2022. Anna has been developing software for ELF Lab as an RA for over 3 years, working on code for eye-tracking experiments (VisualWorldTools) and creating tests for the Ojibwe morphological parser (ParserTools). She is also involved in fieldwork on Nɬeʔkepmxcín, a Salish language spoken in the Pacific Northwest. In her free time, she loves heading outside to work on her knowledge of flowers and birds, and making music.</td> <td><img src="https://ELF-Lab.github.io/images/AnnaHeadshot.jpeg" alt="Anna Stacey Headshot"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><strong>Marcella Jurotich</strong> is a third year PhD student in Linguistics at UBC. Her research interests are in syntax and psycholinguistics, particularly in the interaction between Information Structural elements and syntax and the processing of non-canonical structures. She is excited to be part of the ELF-Lab and to be able to learn more about Anishinaabemowin. In her spare time, she enjoys embroidering, dancing, and playing piano.</td> <td><img src="https://ELF-Lab.github.io/images/MarcellaHeadshot.jpeg" alt="Marcella Jurotich Headshot"></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><strong>Elizabeth Harrigan</strong> is a MA student in Linguistics at UBC, and has worked in ELF-Lab as a Research Assistant on the Ojibwe Corpus project and constraint-based learning.</p> https://ELF-Lab.github.io/projects/ Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ELF-Lab.github.io/projects/ <h2 id="ojibwemorph-a-finite-state-transducer-for-ojibwe-2022present">OjibweMorph: A finite-state transducer for Ojibwe (2022–Present)</h2> <p>The goal of this project is to build a computational model of all possible word forms in Ojibwe, with a particular focus on the Southwestern dialects. Our model is based in a technology called finite-state transducers (FSTs), which uses rules to generate precise outputs. The end result is a program that can provide a sophisticated linguistic analysis for almost any word of Ojibwe, and also produce correct forms of a word given a set of inputs.</p> https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/minh+chrispaper/ Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/minh+chrispaper/ <p>ELF Lab members Chris and Minh have published a proceedings paper at the conference <a href="https://turing.iimas.unam.mx/americasnlp/">AmericasNLP</a> on Ojibwe machine translation.</p> <p>Nguyen, M. Hammerly, C. Silfverberg, M. (2025) A hybrid approach to low-resource machine translation for Ojibwe verbs. <em>Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP 2025).</em></p> https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/naaclpaper/ Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/naaclpaper/ <p>ELF Lab members and collaborators, Shenran Wang, Changbing Yang, Mike Parkhill, Chad Quinn, Jian Zhu, and Chris Hammerly published a paper in the <a href="https://naacl.org/">NAACL</a> proceedings.</p> <p>Wang, S., Yang, C., Parkhill, M., Quinn, C., Hammerly, C., and Zhu, J. (2025) Developing multilingual speech synthesis system for Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet. <em>In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).</em></p> https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/viann+chrispaper/ Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/viann+chrispaper/ <p>ELF Lab members, Viann and Chris published a paper in the proceedings of the <a href="https://computel-workshop.org/">ComputEL-8 Workshop</a> in Honolulu on an Ojibwe text-to-speech Teacher Workshop</p> <p>Chan, V. &amp; Hammerly, C. (2025) Evaluating Indigenous language speech synthesis for education: A participatory design workshop on Ojibwe text-to-speech. <em>In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages (ComputEL-8).</em></p> https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/lsurc/ Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/lsurc/ <p>At the end of February, our Director Dr.Hammerly was invited as a plenary speaker to the Language Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference. This conference run by UBC undergraduates is a celebration of the exciting research done by undergraduates across Canada.</p> <p>Dr. Hammerly was invited to speak on the various projects being developed at ELF Lab relating to technology&rsquo;s role in language revitalization.</p> <p>Additionally, our undergraduate RA, Hope Trischuk, gave an oral presentation on her work with ELF lab: Assessing Intuitions about Obviation in Learners of Anishinaabemowin. For her efforts, she was awarded first place in the Oral Presentation category!</p> https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/labmeetingannouncement1/ Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://ELF-Lab.github.io/post/labmeetingannouncement1/ <p>Next full lab meeting will be on March 25th from 4-5pm in Stores Road Annex Room 5</p> <p>Feel free to reach out if you would like to attend and learn more about ELF lab!</p>