The 2026 Seoul International Conference on Linguistics

Jennifer Cole

Professor, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University

Jennifer Cole is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the phonology and phonetics of prosody—the intonation and temporal patterns of spoken language—and how prosody encodes sentence structure, communicative intentions, and the dynamics of social interaction. She employs computational and statistical methods to model prosody in experimental and corpus data, with an emphasis on automated analysis of large, multi-talker datasets across diverse languages. She has pioneered the use of crowd-sourced perceptual ratings as a basis for building cross-linguistic models of prosody. Her current work includes collaborative projects on prosody in individuals with autism and neurological speech disorders, as well as the development of open, scalable, data-driven infrastructure for collaborative language science research. For more information, visit her homepage and the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab.

Talk: Continuity and the emergence of the discrete: Intonation and its meaning

Hanjung Lee (이한정)

Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Sungkyunkwan University

Hanjung Lee (PhD 2001, Stanford University) is Professor of English Linguistics at Sungkyunkwan University. She previously held a research position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and a faculty position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA. Her research interests lie at the interface of grammar, semantics, and pragmatics, with a particular focus on how linguistic form shapes interpretation and patterns of language use. Her research combines theoretical modeling with experimental and corpus-based methods, and her work has appeared in leading journals including Language (2024), Journal of Linguistics (2022, 2016), Journal of Pragmatics (2013, 2007), Cognition (2007), and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (2003).
She is also the author of the book Artificial Intelligence and Linguistic Imagination: A New Paradigm in Linguistic Research (2025, Sungkyunkwan University Press) and the forthcoming monograph Polysemy in Semantics with Contextualized Language Models: Distribution, Boundaries and Interpretation of Polysemous Senses (Topics in English Linguistics 124, De Gruyter Brill). In these works, she develops a large-scale, usage-based account of verbal polysemy and meaning construction using contextualized language models and experimental methods.
Her recent research has increasingly focused on developing empirically grounded models of meaning that integrate pragmatic theory with experimental design and computational approaches. Her forthcoming book Resonance Pragmatics: A Framework for the Affective and Social Impact of Human and AI Communicative Acts (Element in Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press) grows directly out of this line of work. It synthesizes her theoretical and experimental investigations into what she terms “resonance pragmatics,” offering a unified account of how communicative acts shape affective alignment, social norms, and collective meaning across both human and AI-mediated contexts -based approaches to the study of semantic phenomena.
For more information, visit her homepage and the SKKU Language and Cognition Lab.

Talk: How Linguistics Can Contribute to LLM Development, and Vice-Versa: Insights from Fine-Tuned Models’ Polysemy Processing

Hana Filip

Professor, Department of Linguistics III (Semantics and Pragmatics), Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf

Hana Filip is a Professor of Semantics at Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf. Her research explores the conceptual foundations of semantics, integrating logical/formal and cognitive traditions. She specializes in aspect, genericity, the mass/count distinction, and the interaction between noun phrase semantics and verbal aspect. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley, and her dissertation, Aspect, Eventuality Types and Noun Phrase Semantics, was published in the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series. Prior to her current role, she held faculty positions at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and the University of Rochester, and worked as a computational linguist at SRI International and ICSI at Berkeley. Her recent research, including the DFG-funded project on the "Individuation of Eventualities and Abstract Things," continues to advance the study of semantic interpretation across diverse languages such as English, German, and various Slavic languages. For more information, visit her homepage

Roberto Zamparelli

Professor, Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento

Roberto Zamparelli is an Associate Professor at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento. A leading figure in formal semantics and the syntax of Noun Phrases (DPs), his recent research bridges the gap between theoretical linguistics and generative AI. In his 2025 work, "Doing Linguistics in the GPT era," he explores how the linguistic competence of Large Language Models (LLMs) compares to human cognition, advocating for the use of "human-sized" training data (e.g., the BabyLM challenge) to probe the limits of data-driven approaches.
His current projects, including REPLAI (Repetition Experiments as Probes on Linguistics Analysis and Integration) and TREiL, investigate how computational models can identify multilingual political views and handle complex multimodal data. By integrating classic formal analysis with modern LLM-based methodologies, his work offers a new paradigm for understanding language evolution, semantic shifts, and the cognitive foundations of grammar. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and is a frequent contributor to major journals in both theoretical and computational linguistics. For more information, visit his homepage.