Research Experience for Undergraduates Site
REU Site: Animal Language Processing and Understanding
Activity Timetable
The project consists of two phases: Phase 1 (8 weeks part-time) and Phase 2 (8 weeks full-time).
Phase 1:
Self-study: All students will be provided with a list of book chapters, papers, and tutorial videos about animal communications and an introduction to natural language processing to prepare them theoretically for the upcoming summer program. For computer science students are also required to get familiarized with our existing code base, data sets and data processing pipeline. Students of other majors are required to learn how to use the in-house annotation tool Praat++ that we have developed.
Research proposal: Students will be group into teams of 3+ members each and focus on one animal species (e.g., crows, finches, tits). They will do literature review about the selected species, and come up with a research question about a novel linguistic capability of that species, and then produce a concrete research proposal to be executed during the 8-week on-site program.
Weekly sync-ups: Every week, each group will meet with their mentors, report their progress and discuss questions or challenges they may have. In addition to these meetings, the participanting students will communicate on an ad hoc basis with their graduate mentors to promptly resolve questions or issues.
Phase 2:
Orientation and Lab Tours (Week 1): Graduate Mentors will assist participants to settle in to the UTA house and assign them to the workspace in the PI’s and Co-PI’s labs. Participants will meet mentors’ graduate students and become familiarized with the campus and surroundings. Workshops on research conduct and safety will be held.
Actual Research (Week 2-6) : Participants will carry out the research according to their research proposal developed in Phase 1, under the supervision of faculty and graduate mentors. In the meantime, regular weekly group meetings, research seminars, academic workshops and other social events will take place on the sideline.
Paper Writing and Presentation (Week 7-8): In the last two weeks, participants will focus on writing the research papers about their results and preparing presentations to share their findings with the entire cohort as well as the larger UTA community. Previous REU cycles have already produced the following paper submissions:
- A Preview to Computational Animal Linguistics, submitted to Computational Linguistics.
- Unsupervised Discovery and Analysis of the Vocal Repertoires and Patterns of Select Corvid Species, submitted to ICASSP 2026.
- Sequential Versus Hierarchical Grammar Models for Great Tit Vocal Sequence Analysis, submitted to ICASSP 2026.