Applied NLP
I am currently a postdoc in a research group (ILPS) that pursues a variety of approaches to the problem of intelligent information access. As a computational semanticist within the group, I focus on solving problems that require interpreting linguistic entities. Within the project through which I am funded, ITEQA, I am working on integrating data-driven and rule-based methods for temporal information extraction and event ordering. Additionally, as part of the ongoing question-answering and information-extraction efforts within the group, I work on anaphora resolution and shallow semantic analysis (question classification, dependency-based logical form generation, etc.).
Relevant talks (Keynote exported as PDF):
- DIR, 10 January 2005
- TERN workshop, 23 September 2004
Theoretical (computational) semantics
I am also interested in more theoretical aspects of semantics. In my PhD thesis, I investigated an aspect of the semantics-pragmatics interface: the incorporation of presuppositions into quantifier domains. I also developed a DRT-based representation language that incorporates the Episodic Logic view of situations and allows for flexible reference within descriptions of these situations. Much earlier, in my senior undergraduate thesis, I proved that higher-order unification (as used for ellipsis resolution) can be coherently applied to standard representations of intensional constructions.
Relevant talks (all quite similar):
- SuB9, 2 November 2004
- DIP Colloquium, UvA (ILLC), 25 June 2004
- Semantics Colloquium, Radboud University, Nijmegen, 27 April 2004
- Thesis defense, Rochester, NY, 22 March, 2004
- Computing with LLI Seminar, UvA (ILLC), 27 February 2004
- CLCG, University of Groningen, 10 December 2003
Discourse structure and semantics
During three internships in Palo Alto (one at PARC and two at FXPAL), I worked on theories of discourse interpretation, in particular, on the interaction of information structure (i.e., topic-focus structure, whether expressed prosodically or syntatically) with discourse structure. Much earlier, I spent several years as a research assistant on another project investigating the correlation between intonation and discourse structure, which resulted in, among other things, an annotation manual for naive discourse annotators.