Hadas Kotek

office location: Cambridge, MA
email: hkotek at alum.mit.edu

I am a Linguist working at Apple. I work on data science for natural language annotation projects for the Siri and Language Technologies team. This includes contributing to Siri ontology development and design; leading Named Entity Recognition efforts; co-coordinating and contributing to Data Science and Engineering around various Siri products; establishing metrics to measure annotator productivity, accuracy, and throughput; contributing to new task and tool development around data annotation; and coordinating with vendor project managers, annotators, and Annotation Operations admins.

I additionally continue to engage in research as a Research Affiliate at MIT linguistics. My research focuses on different aspects of the syntax-semantics interface, using both traditional and experimental methods. I mainly work on A-bar phenomena, including wh-questions, focus constructions, relative clauses and free relatives, ellipsis, wh-indefinites, (focus) intervention effects, and comparatives and superlatives. I additionally have an ongoing interest in studying and contributing to equity in the field.

I received my PhD in Linguistics from MIT in 2014, with a dissertation on the syntax, semantics, and processing of questions. Prior to joining Apple, I was a Lecturer in Semantics at Yale, a Visiting Assistant Professor in Syntax at NYU, and I have held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University.

Please visit the about page for more details concerning my research interests and my academic history. See my resume, my academic CV, my MIT linguistics user page, or my LinkedIn page for additional details.

✨ ️NEW✨ Blog

My academic job market journey: a short post about my own experience on the academic job market, mainly focusing on the numbers and concrete facts.
Academic job interview questions: a compilation of 25 sets of interview questions I was asked in interviews between 2014–2019.
Alt-Ac informational interviews: on informational interviews for alt-ac careers, including a suggested list of questions.
Do you need a graduate degree to get an Alt-Ac job?: answering this FAQ. Short answer: probably not.
Learning about Alt-Ac opportunities (aka how to get started): on getting started on the journey by asking yourself some questions and gathering some information.
Prepping for Alt-Ac jobs (aka taking action): on getting started on the journey by taking some active steps to learn or expand relevant skills.
Let’s talk about terminology: an ongoing master list of industry terminology.
Transferable skills (and how to talk about them): a compilation of transferable skills for AltAc jobs, including sample resume bullet points using my own experience in academia to illustrate.
Job titles and job descriptions for linguists (and other social scientists): a compilation of (a) job titles, (b) informal job descriptions, (c) sample job ads, and (d) interviews with job holders for a diverse set of non-technical roles for linguists. This post is over 5k words long and divided into 10 categories, since there’s a lot to cover.

Science and other outreach

Superlinguo jobs series post.
The Vocal Fries podcast appearance (“John Mary Bill Sue”).
Because Language podcast appearance.
@Science_Is_US #PeopleofScience campaign on Twitter and Instagram by scienceisus.org.
Linguistic Society of America: January 2021 Member Spotlight.
Resources on Equity and Inclusivity in Linguistics (REIL) Guidelbook: a joint effort of LSA’s COGEL (Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics, formerly COSWL) and SALT’s SALTED (Semantics and Linguistic Theory: Equity and Diversity): with Melissa Baese-Berk, Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, Ivona Kucerova, Elin McCready, Mary Moroney, Jessica Rett, Carly Sommerlot, and Susi Wurmbrand.
Pop-Up Mentoring Program; originally with by Melissa Baese-Berk, Paola Cepeda, Kristen Syrett, Jessica Rett, Ivona Kucerova. Now a continued LSA COGEL effort. The recipient of the 2019 LSA Linguistic Service Award.

Newest work

Recent presentations:

Meet the Authors: Gender Bias & Stereotypes in Linguistics Research and Teaching. LSA Webinar, January 2022.
Panelist: Challenges and Opportunities for Mentoring in Linguistics. 2022 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting (virtual), January 2022.
Robert Frank and Hadas Kotek. 2022. Top-down derivations: Flipping syntax on its head. 2022 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting (virtual), January 2022.
Itamar Kastner, Hadas Kotek, Rikker Dockum, Michael Dow, Maria Esipova, Caitlin M. Green, Todd Snider. The Open Letter: Responses and Recommendations. 2022 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting (virtual), January 2022.

Books:

Kotek, Hadas. 2019. Composing Questions. Linguistics Inquiry Monograph series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Halpert, Claire, Hadas Kotek, and Coppe van Urk (eds.). 2017. A Pesky Set: Papers for David Pesetsky. MIT Working Paper in Linguistics 80. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL.

Journal papers:

Paola Cepeda, Hadas Kotek, Katharina Pabst, and Kristen Syrett. 2021. Gender bias in linguistics textbooks: Has anything changed since Macaulay & Brice (1997)?. Language 97(4): 678–702.
Kotek, Hadas, Rikker Dockum, Sarah Babinski, and Christopher Geissler. 2021. Gender bias and stereotypes in linguistic example sentences. Language 97(4): 653–677.
Kotek, Hadas, Sarah Babinski, Rikker Dockum, and Christopher Geissler. 2021. Gender stereotypes and inclusion in language teaching. Babylonia 1: 66–70.
Kastner, Itamar, Hadas Kotek, Rikker Dockum, Michael Dow, Maria Esipova, Caitlin Green, Todd Snider. Who speaks for us? Lessons from the Pinker letter. Manuscript.

Peer reviewed conference papers:

Sun, David Q., Hadas Kotek, Christopher Klein, Mayank Gupta, William Li and Jason D. Williams. 2020. Improving Human-Labeled Data through Dynamic Automatic Conflict Resolution. The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING).
Patel, Alkesh, Akanksha Bindal, Hadas Kotak, Christopher Klein, and Jason D. Williams. Generating Natural Questions from Images for Multimodal Assistant.
- West Coast NLP (WeCNLP), October 2020.
- IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2021.

Recorded talks

Gender bias in constructed example sentences (with Rikker Dockum, Sarah Babinski, and Christopher Geissler); slides, YouTube recording.
- Webinar, SOAS, March 2021.
- Colloquium talk, University of Connecticut, March 2021.
- Colloquium talk, University of Oregon, October 2020.
Ellipsis licensing in sluicing: A QuD account (with Matthew Barros; handout, slides, video recording).
- Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 53, University of Chicago, May 2017.
- Multiple questions about sluicing, Yale University, April 2017.
- GLOW workshop on compositionality at the interfaces, Leiden University, March 2017.
Diagnosing covert movement. Panel on questions, workshop for David Pesetsky. MIT Department of Linguistics, February 2017. (handout, slides, video recording, starting at 1:15:30).

Additional details about these and other papers and presentations can be found on my publications page. To read more about my various projects, visit the research page.

For the most up to date list of my presentations and publications, please consult my CV.