Peter Cao was a research assistant under Curt Burgess from Winter 2013 to Spring 2015 and has since graduated from UCR with a B.A. in Psychology. Working with the HAL (The Hyperspace Analogue to Language) model, Burgess and Cao collaborated to test the model on a couple of Mark Twain’s most well-known novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in order to analyze the linguistic results of the content within the novels that HAL can obtain and in particular, the connotation of the word, “nigger” which is also commonly referred to as the “n-word” due to the controversy the epithet creates. Cao had the privilege of presenting the research at three academic conferences including: SSCUR at Whitter College, the UCR Symposium, and SCiP (Society for Computers in Psychology). Burgess and Cao intend to have a research paper published in the future.

Attached below is the current Powerpoint that was presented and developed at each conference:

HAL Semantic Analysis on the “N-Word” in Mark Twain Novels PPT