Sophia A. Malamud

Sophia A. Malamud is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Brandeis University, where she directs the Meaning In Language Research Group (MILa) and is affiliated with the Language & Linguistics Program. Her research specializes in theoretical linguistics with a focus on formal semantics, formal pragmatics, discourse-syntax interactions, and semantics-pragmatics interface.

Her educational background includes a Ph.D. in Linguistics with a dissertation on Semantics and pragmatics of arbitrariness and an M.A. in Mathematics exploring statistical decision theory in Entropy as relevance: maximizing entropy and minimizing loss.

Malamud's research investigates discourse coherence, word order variations, indexicality, semantics of impersonals/plurals, speech acts, and utterance modifiers. She leads NSF-funded projects creating annotated corpora of spoken Russian (including the BiRCh Corpus), examining bilingual acquisition and heritage language phenomena. Her work employs corpus linguistics, experimental methods, and formal modeling.

Her publications demonstrate consistent focus on pragmatic computation models, conversational dynamics, and cross-linguistic semantics, with frequent examination of Russian, Mandarin, and Greek data. Key themes include commitment avoidance strategies, conversational scoreboard modeling, and formal analyses of particles/pronouns.

Awards include:

• NSF Grant BCS-1651083 for BiRCh Corpus development
• Mandel Foundation Faculty Grant for heritage language research
• Theodore and Jane Norman Award (2018)
• Multiple Brandeis Provost Research Grants

Malamud has advised 8+ graduate/undergraduate theses on topics including heritage Russian pragmatics, utterance particles, reduplication, and distributivity. She collaborates internationally on corpus projects and directs research teams at Brandeis' Laboratory for Linguistics and Computation.