This milestone event, the first IMLD celebration at this scale on campus, was led by and and brought together more than a dozen units across campus and beyond, reflecting an extraordinary level of collaboration and shared commitment to multilingualism.

Participating departments, centers, and offices included: CLaSE (Center for Latino Heritage and Spanish Language Excellence), Anthropology, Linguistics, Spanish & Latino Studies, World Languages & Cultures, NJCIJ (New Jersey Center for Indigenous Justice), Writing Studies, the Office of Global Engagement, the Office of Inclusive Excellence, the Office for Hispanic Initiatives, and Sprague Library.

The event also featured strong participation from international students and student organizations, including MASA, PASO, LASO, ESA, and NAIS, whose engagement contributed to the dynamic and inclusive atmosphere of the day.

With over 300 attendees, including students, staff, faculty, and members of Indigenous groups from Latin America and Native American communities, this event became a vibrant testament to the linguistic and cultural richness that defines our campus and surrounding areas.

The First Floor Reading Room of Sprague Library was transformed into an immersive, global experience where participants “traveled� across languages. Each attendee received a “language passport�, guiding them through a journey across more than twenty interactive tables, each representing a different language and cultural context or perspective. As they moved from table to table, they collected stamps or stickers while engaging in activities that celebrated language as a living, dynamic force.

Students explored language through creativity, play, and reflection. They became “Vocabulary Detectives,� shared regional expressions at the “Teach Us Your Dialect� table, and connected through challenges like “Language Mapping� and “Translation Challenges�. At other tables, they mapped their linguistic identities, contributed to a “Word Wall�, and responded to prompts such as “Tell Us in Your Language� and “Where in the World Is Your Language?�

Hands-on cultural experiences added depth and beauty to the event. Participants practiced Chinese calligraphy, learned to write their names in Korean, and explored basic expressions in French and Mazahua. They also engaged with global Indigenous cultures through interactive Kichwa language guessing activities and the Navajo String Game.

Other stations invited deeper reflection on language as identity and future. Through activities including “Language Futures Survey�, “Words of Wisdom�, and the “Latin American Slang Wall -¿Cómo se dice?�,  we celebrated the emotional and cultural connections embedded in language.

A highlight of the event was the series of four lightning panels, which brought powerful voices and perspectives into the room. These included presentations by Dr. Jesse Ha (Teaching & Learning), Librarian Catherine Oliver, Verónica Muenala, Próspero Martinez and Elías Hilario Guzmán (members of the Concejo de Pueblos Originarios), Precious Benally (Director of NJCIJ), and three outstanding students, Alondra Molina, Sofia Andersen Garreffa and Kaung Hla Zan. Presenters provided deeply moving personal reflections and scholarly insights, reminding us of the individual, cultural, and political significance of language in people’s lives.

The event also created meaningful bridges across time and tradition. Participants read graffiti from the ancient world and engaged with Indigenous languages and knowledge systems, reminding us that language is not only communication, but memory, resistance, and continuity.

Throughout the room, there was laughter, curiosity, and a powerful sense of belonging. Languages were spoken and celebrated, not as barriers, but as bridges. The presence of President Koppell, who joined the celebration and expressed appreciation for the energy and vibrant participation of attendees further underscored the importance of this collective moment.

This celebration was more than an event. It was a living expression of what it means to be part of a multilingual, multicultural campus space where every language is recognized as a source of strength.

See you next year!

Dr. Maisa Taha and Dr. Antonella Calarota-Ninman

“Honestly, I used to think I would regret getting involved,� she said. “I spent the first semester of my freshman year completely secluded. I never talked to people other than my professors, and I rushed home after class.�

But everything changed when she started saying “yes.�

Omayma, a with a , says her journey toward speech-language pathology began during the COVID-19 pandemic. Watching her younger brother receive speech therapy over Zoom sparked something. “Witnessing the difference that therapist made in his life was the factor that ultimately made me decide on this career.�

Her coursework and hands-on experiences only deepened that commitment. One of the most impactful moments came when she shadowed Heather Dibble, a speech therapist at the Ben Samuels Children’s Center. “For the first time, I saw the techniques I had studied in action,� she said. “Observing the therapist’s strategies, asking questions, and reflecting on each session confirmed that speech-language pathology is not just something I want to study, but it’s the career I want to dedicate myself to.�

Outside the classroom, Omayma became a fierce advocate for students as Executive Vice President of the SGA. She chaired weekly meetings, helped allocate $40,000 in scholarships, and supported over 130 student organizations—all while excelling academically and presenting at student research conferences.

“What made this role so meaningful was the responsibility I held to advocate for students,� she said. “It taught me the value of servant leadership—leading not for recognition, but to empower others and leave things better than I found them.�

She credits mentors like Nicole Fleming, Director of Special Events, and Julia DelBagno, Assistant Dean for Student Engagement, for showing her how authenticity and leadership can go hand in hand. “They continuously inspired me, not just through their professional success, but through their authenticity. As a young woman aspiring to lead and make a difference, I found in them powerful role models.�

Omayma Jabara, Nicole Fleming and Julia DelBagno

Reflecting on her time at Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß, Omayma says she’ll always carry the lesson that “meaningful change happens when people come together with shared purpose.â€� And if she could give one piece of advice to her first-year self?

“Don’t wait! Take up spaces! Make this campus yours.�

Her definition of success has evolved, too. “Success means having the confidence to trust that, even when the path ahead is unclear, you’ll find your way through the murky waters that inevitably flood your path.�

Omayma lives the University’s motto, carpe diem. In her own words, “Waiting for the ‘perfect’ opportunity can leave you stagnant, while embracing the present and saying ‘yes’ to new experiences opens doors you never expected,� she says.

This fall, Omayma will continue her journey at Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß as a graduate student in the Speech Language Pathology Master’s program, where she’s also earned a graduate assistantship.

Ready to Start Your Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß Journey?

Prospective Students and Parents: Learn more about Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß admissions, our Linguistics major and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr. Howell refocuses the conversation surrounding the technological revolution of AI chatbots by pointing out their inability to be very creative or conversational. He advises against interpreting their conversing skills to be anything more than a strategy of repeating past words and guessing future ones.

The ability to critically think still remains human and thus Dr. Howell says, “When it’s really important, you don’t want to end your search for information with the chatbot.�

Written by Sarah Ramirez

Congratulations to this year’s Dean’s Recognition Award winners!

Research

The Research Award recognizes faculty members for their significant contributions to advancing knowledge within their field. Criteria typically includes quality, impact, and originality of research findings, as well as notable publications, grants, and collaborations.

2024 Winner: Daniela Peterka Benton, Associate Professor in Justice Studies

Service

The Service Award recognizes staff members for their outstanding commitment to service within CHSS and the broader community. Criteria includes leadership in academic governance, professional service, community engagement, and contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

2024 Winner: , Director of Operations and Administrative Affairs, College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Teaching

The Teaching Award recognizes individuals who have demonstrated excellence in pedagogy and educational impact. Criteria includes innovative teaching methods, student engagement, mentorship, and contributions to curriculum development.

2024 Winners

, Professor, English

, Associate Professor, Sociology

, Assistant Professor, Psychology

, English, Special Teaching Category

, Instructional Specialist, Writing Studies

, Adjunct, Linguistics

Sidney Berger (German and Linguistics), Maya Niemsyk (Professional and Public Writing), Alli Kodila (German and Linguistics), Cameron Mackay (Philosophy), and Siegfrid Schaefer (German) presented five excellent research papers, professionally fielded audience questions and answers, and met 70 other rising scholars from the Northeast.

Students presented timely innovative presentations on such topics as HIV/AIDS in East Germany, the role of “Gendersprache” and “Denglish” from a historical linguistic perspective, the use of Kietzdeutsch in online German content, transgender identities in multiple film variants of The Little Mermaid, and analysis of the “Slept Agenda of Popular Culture” from a philosophical perspective.

Faculty from other institutions noted how well-researched these Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß presentations were.

Dr. Williams, in collaboration with the Indonesian colleagues, will create video recordings of language use, focusing on everyday talk and interaction, which they will transcribe and translate to create an initial corpus of the language. The research team will also record some other materials, depending on the needs and interests of the community members.

Dr. Williams hopes to create a preliminary dictionary and other materials for the community in the future. This is an initial project that aims to get better information on Benggoi, its grammar and endangerment status. Dr. Williams will travel to Seram in July-August 2024 and likely return in July 2025.

Adjunct ASL professor Jessica Wohlstetter is the instructor for this amazing program. Over the next 8 weeks, this cohort will immerse themselves into the world of ASL interpreting as they work towards obtaining certification.

See more from NYPD Equity and Inclusion .

What are VERY popular words among cult leaders? Why do some people learn a second language faster than others? How do babies learn to speak? How many languages does AI know? Tune in to find out!

In this episode, a panel of linguists from Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß discusses their diverse research areas and the intersection of linguistics with AI and computer science. They delve into topics such as accents, phrasing, second language acquisition, and the use of emojis in different cultures. They share their backgrounds and how they became interested in their respective fields. We learn the importance of understanding individual differences in language learning and the need for collaborative and respectful approaches in language documentation. This is a conversation you don’t want to miss!

Unveiling the Complexity of Language

Computational Linguistics: Bridging Language and Technology
shares her journey from a background in languages and linguistics to her current focus on computational linguistics and natural language processing. She highlights the practical applications of linguistic knowledge in AI and computer science.

Exploring the Melodies of Speech: Prosody and American Dialects
delves into the field of prosody, which encompasses intonation, rhythm, and stress in speech. He discusses how prosody plays a crucial role in conveying meaning and explores the variations in American dialects.

Unlocking the Secrets of Language Acquisition
sheds light on the complexities of second language acquisition. She investigates individual differences in language learning and explores the cognitive factors that influence language acquisition.

Decoding the Language of Writing
focuses on college writing, examining the differences between native and non-native speakers. She explores how writing styles vary across different contexts and cultures.

Computational Modeling of Language Acquisition
Libby Barak discusses her work in computational modeling of language acquisition, both for first language and second language learners. She explores how computational tools can aid in understanding language learning processes.

Documenting Endangered Languages
shares his research on documenting endangered languages, emphasizing the importance of preserving linguistic diversity. He discusses the role of computational tools in collecting and processing language data.

Abstract:

English speakers constantly and effortlessly use prosody, such as accent and phrasing, to communicate beyond the meaning of individual words. Yet our understanding of prosody, and its integration in speech technologies, have lagged behind, particularly so for language varieties that are already underrepresented. While millions of Americans speak African American English (AAE) or Latinx English (LE), these language varieties remain underrepresented in basic and applied research, with negative consequences for speech therapy, education, criminal justice, and employment. This research will result in a corpus of AAE, LE and European American English speech data annotated for prosody, which will be used to improve our scientific understanding of prosody and to create tools for automatic detection of accent and phrase boundaries. A team of 7 students from diverse backgrounds will receive training that will provide a gateway to careers in language and technology.

The corpus will include pairs of same-dialect speakers recorded in a map task, a method used to elicit spontaneous, naturalistic speech. The data will be transcribed using automatic speech recognition and hand correction, and automatically segmented into words and individual sounds using forced alignment software. Both trained and untrained coders will annotate the data for sentence accent and boundary using Rapid Prosody Transcription, an established method designed for fast, intuitive prosodic annotation by non-experts. Acoustic information, including duration, pitch, and intensity, will be extracted and used with the annotations to train a machine learning detection model, and to test previous findings about the frequency, distribution, acoustics and perception of accent and boundary in the three English language varieties.

It’s all in a day’s work for Besaleli, a founding NLP research scientist at , which recently landed $7.5 million in pre-seed and seed funding, according to a company press release. Besaleli estimates that on a weekly basis, she puts in 60 hours at her job and 20 at Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß. “I don’t get much sleep but that’s OK, I’m doing what I love,â€� she says.

Seek AI, Besaleli says, provides “a natural language interface for a company’s data. The idea is that you should be able to ask any question that you want, in natural language, and it will pull the data for you from your databases. The motivation behind this is that companies often have to either hire a lot of data analysts to just write this code called structured query language or SQL to pull this data from what are often very messy databases.�

“They often find a lot of the time consumed writing something that we believe could be automated,� Besaleli says. “So, at the core of it, we are building code-generation models that will be able to generate code, given natural language that will interact with your database for you. We’re streamlining the process of finding answers at a company and streamlining the way that it’s done.�

Results, she says, could be complete in minutes versus days. Still, Besaleli says, Seek AI’s objective is not to replace data analysts. “Our goal is to make their jobs easier so that they can do more meaningful work,� she says.

Besaleli adds that “The generative AI space is very, very new. Even six months ago, we didn’t have the capacity to do what we’re doing now. It’s a very, very rapidly growing field.�

Already, the SoHo-based Seek AI has more than a dozen pilots with tech, fintech and consumer brands customers ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies. Seek AI will use the funding infusion to “accelerate product development and support its mission of making data accessible to anyone in an organization via a natural language interface,� the press release states.

As a co-founder, Besaleli played a role in obtaining that funding. “Raz would do investor pitches with me and speak about the underlying technology behind Seek,� says Seek AI Founder and CEO Sarah Nagy.

Nagy says she had no qualms about Besaleli still being a graduate student when they started working together. “I was really impressed by Raz’s background in linguistics, combined with her technical chops working with transformer models in PyTorch [an open source machine-learning framework that accelerates research prototyping to production deployment]. She also had co-founded a startup before, in the aerospace industry, which was incredibly impressive. On top of all that, she had a great attitude: eager to learn, get her hands dirty, and work hard to build Seek. Once I had known her for a few weeks, I knew I had to get her in the boat.�

At the time she and Besaleli met, Nagy says, “I had built a very small prototype of an AI model and was facing the challenge of scaling the model and getting it to work with real-world data. Raz came up with several innovations that solved these challenges and helped propel Seek to be the leader in our space.�

While ChatGPT has entered the artificial intelligence lexicon thanks to tons of media attention, Besaleli says there’s a big difference between that tool and the capabilities of Seek AI. “We use a model like ChatGPT in our systems, but the scope of our systems are much, much larger. ChatGPT is just a model, and it can generate SQL but from a very, very limited scope,� she says, adding, “What we do is a little different because we’re also a repository, a centralized location for all the questions that that business asks. We’re very much focused on information retrieval, not just generating code.�

Linguistics and Computer Science Professor Anna Feldman, who chairs the Linguistics department, was a key factor in Raz Besaleli choosing to enroll in the Computational Linguistics master’s program at Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß.

Besaleli is already an expert on the subject. She recently was the only student alongside three Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß professors on the faculty panel “â€� at the Feliciano School of Business. She sat alongside her research advisor and Computer Science Professor Jing Peng, Linguistics department chair and Computer Science Professor Anna Feldman, and Writing Studies Associate Professor Ronald Brooks Jr.

When Besaleli was weighing her options about which school to attend, the Annapolis, Maryland, native looked at universities in the U.S., as well as the University of Reykjavik in Iceland. Ultimately, she chose to study at Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß largely because of Feldman. “I was interested in her research, and we just got along really well.â€� Besaleli adds that affordability also was a factor in her decision.

Feldman says she was unaware that she played a role in Besaleli’s choosing to attend graduate school in New Jersey. “But I’m happy Raz joined our program,â€� she says. “We really enjoy having her at Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß.â€�

Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß is one of the few universities in the country that offer a Master of Science in Computational Linguistics – and the only university in New Jersey. “It’s also special because it’s truly interdisciplinary, housed in both Linguistics and Computer Science, and gives our students a strong background in both computer science and linguistics,â€� says Feldman.

Besaleli, Feldman adds, is an excellent student. “She never takes any facts for granted; she always wants to challenge ideas and verify claims. She worked with me on a project trying to discover historical semantic shifts in Modern Hebrew and discovered very interesting patterns,� she says.

Computer Science Professor Jing Peng (center) seen here at the Natural Language Processing Lab, serves as Raz Besaleli’s research advisor.

With the guidance of Peng, Feldman says Besaleli is “exploring how large language models can translate SQL queries into plain English. [SQL is a domain-specific language used for managing data held in relational databases, and SQL queries have a specific structure.] Raz would like to find out whether generating an SQL query from a text description requires a lot more context than the other way around.�

As for the future, Besaleli expects to graduate in May “if everything works out and if I have time to write my final projects,� she says, laughing. She certainly doesn’t have to worry about the job market, and she’ll be able to devote her attention to Seek AI.

“I see this revolutionizing the way that people interact with their databases,� she says, “and I hope that we can just make life as easy as possible for those in the data space, so that they can do the things that are important and that they want to do.�

Raz Besaleli (second from left) participates in the Natural Language Processing Lab with other students as Linguistics department chair and Computer Science Professor Anna Feldman looks on.

Feldman says the Seek AI platform “is a great product that uses sophisticated natural language processing techniques and machine learning to allow users to use natural language commands to query databases…. As for Raz’s future, life is an adventure, and I hope Raz will continue building AI applications for social good.�

Meanwhile, Nagy is looking forward to navigating Seek AI’s future alongside her co-founder. “Raz is, by many accounts, a genius,� says Nagy, “and I am excited to continue to work with her.�

Story by Staff Writer Sylvia A. Martinez. Photos by John J. LaRosa.

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