Hadas Kotek

Apple Park, Cupertino, CA
hkotek at alum.mit.edu

I am a Linguist working at Apple. My role involves improving Siri’s Natural Language Understanding. Specifically, I lead Siri’s NL Understanding Annotation projects. This includes contributing to Siri ontology development and design; leading Named Entity Recognition efforts; creating annotation guidelines and trainings; establishing metrics to measure annotator productivity, accuracy, and throughput; interfacing with data scientists and engineers to develop annotation projects; managing and setting project priorities to align with organization-wide milestones and guidelines; and coordinating with vendors and Finance.

Although I am not currently teaching at a university, I still accept some advising requests. If you are on this site for this reason, email me at the above address.

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. My main research specialty is in understanding the cognitive constraints on the structure of human language, with the goal of developing an inventory of the tools available to the language faculty for the construction of natural language utterances and for their interpretation: What strategies are employed during structure building in the syntax? What additional machinery must the semantics provide in order to interpret these structures? How does this inventory vary cross-linguistically, and how does it manifest itself in online sentence processing? My research employs a variety of experimental techniques, supplemented by elicitation work and traditional judgment work. Some of my recent research topics include the syntax and semantics of wh-questions, Association with Focus, relative clauses, ellipsis, and comparative and superlative quantifiers.

Please visit the about page for more details concerning my research interests and my academic history. See my industry resume and my academic CV for additional details.

Newest work

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:

Kotek, Hadas, Rikker Dockum, Sarah Babinski, and Christopher Geissler. Gender bias and stereotypes in linguistic example sentences. Manuscript (submitted).
Phillips, Josh and Hadas Kotek. 2019. Discourse anaphoric otherwise: Information structure & modal subordination. Manuscript (submitted).
Barros, Matthew and Hadas Kotek. 2019. Ellipsis licensing and redundancy reduction: A focus-based approach. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1), 100. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.811.
Kotek, Hadas and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine. 2019. Wh-indeterminates in Chuj (Mayan). The Canadian Journal of Linguistics 64(1): 62–101.

Recorded talks

Ellipsis licensing in sluicing: A QuD account (with Matthew Barros; handout, slides, video feed).
- 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 feed, 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.