Taraka Rama featured in an international journal. 

Department of Linguistics Assistant Professor, Taraka Kasicheyanula’s publication on new methodologies on reconstructing the history of the World's languages was released in the journal PLOS ONE. The journal is an internationally known publication with no paywall. The articles accepted in the journal are frequently accessed and then cited by others, allowing for the information and influential analysis to reach a wide readership across the sciences. 

Information Science Ph.D. student, Sahar Behpour, has had her paper titled “Automatic trend detection: Time-biased document clustering” published in the Knowledge-Based Systems Journal, an international and interdisciplinary journal in the field of artificial intelligence. The paper is about a novel method for automatic trend detection. Sahar is also a recipient of the 2021 UNT Graduate Student Research Award. Currently, she is working as an intern for the QMSC company, as well as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Information Science.

Dr. Shobhana Chelliah to take fall sabbatical as she’s named a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow. The Fulbright-Nehru fellowship will require her full attention despite a brief delay in travel due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Chelliah currently serves at the Associate Dean of Research and Development, while being an active faculty member in the Linguistics department. This fellowship, considered highly competitive and only two are given each year.  

Linguists from across Zoom gathered to raise scholarship funds and answer the question, “What is a squib?” 

“What is a squib, what is a Squibber scholarship? Well squibs are mysteries. We linguists when we find something that we don’t understand we poke at it and it pokes at us and sometimes we work on it sometimes for a year, or ten years, sometimes we never get anywhere with it because it’s so hard,” says John ‘Haj’ Ross is a linguist poet, author, artist and Professor at the University of North Texas, Department of Linguistics.

The College of Information celebrates Dr. Alexis Palmer of the Linguistics department on her CAREER award. Palmer is one of three researchers from the University of North Texas, who were awarded more than $1.5 million total in grant money through the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER).

This January, Associate Dean of Research and Advancement and Linguistics Professor, Shobhana Chelliah received notice of her award for the University Distinguished Research Professor award. Chelliah’s research on language documentation and endangered South Asian Languages began years ago. It became her mission to support the international education of UNT students through interacting with  speaker communities and institutions back in India and supporting language documentation there.

In collaboration with UNT POD, our COI faculty experts discuss their mission to document and preserve endangered and indigenous languages, including South Asian languages such as Lamkang, Mankiyali, Kashmiri and Burushaski. They also discuss events such as UNT’s Year of Indigenous Languages series and Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

During the past year, Lillian Randall transformed her life into a cycle of dedication to her sport Taekwondo. This type of dedication included driving across the state to her hometown of Midlothian, Texas, for Taekwondo practice, heading back to UNT in Denton for classes, a campus job, and maintaining a strict diet while on the road.

“Due to the time I dedicated to training and traveling, I missed most of the times my friends were hanging out and I saw my family even less,” says Randall.

Traveling to Kashmir with Dr. Munshi and my fellow students was both enlightening and immensely rewarding. We were fortunate enough to speak with all manner of people there, from those who enjoyed the benefits of the system to those who have struggled because of it. The connections that Prof. Munshi has forged and maintained in the country with various people enabled us to interact with teachers, students, journalists, mothers, priests and lawyers to name just a few.

Congratulations to Linguistics Department Chair, Dr. Sadaf Munshi on the release of her new book "Srinagar Burushaski: A Descriptive and Comparative Account with
Analyzed Texts"