Welcome!

Since the summer of 2022, I am a FNRS Research Associate at the CENTAL (UCLouvain). My main interests are computational linguistics and language acquisition. Before that, I have been an Assistant, then Associate Professor in Linguistics at The Ohio State University. I was part of the Computational Linguistics and Language Technology lab.

NEWS

2022: I am one of the working group leaders of the COST Action CA21167 Universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology.

2021 - 2022: Marine Carpuat, Ivan Vladimir Meza-Ruiz and I are Program Chairs of NAACL 2022!

Summer 2019: I have been awarded a CAREER grant by the NSF for my work on automatically drawing inferences.

ACL 2019: My student Nanjiang Jiang and I have been awarded the best short paper award for our paper!

A BIT ABOUT MY RESEARCH

I received my PhD. from Stanford University in December 2012 under the supervision of Christopher Manning. I was part of the Natural Language Processing group. My research focuses on developing computational linguistic methods that capture what is conveyed by language beyond the literal meaning of the words. I recently worked on "veridicality": how do people interpret events they read about in the news, do they think such events really happen, did not happen, or are just a possibility? I have also worked on grounding meanings from Web data, and I showed how such meanings can drive pragmatic inference. I have also been working on recognizing textual inference and on contradiction detection.

I have been the principal developer of the Stanford dependencies, designed to be a practical representation of grammatical relations and predicate argument structure (de Marneffe & Manning 2008), which then evolved into the Universal Dependencies. The representation makes explicit the relations between the predicate in a sentence, which denotes the event, and the nouns which denote the event participants. It has also been used in many domains, including bioinformatics, machine translation and literary text analysis. It is also used as model to develop dependency schemes in other languages.

In language acquisition, I have examined whether children are sensitive to the same gradient constraints that adults use in choosing between different syntactic constructions, focusing on the dative alternation in English (give the kids the toys vs. give the toys to the kids). I have also analyzed how children acquire French verb morphology through studies of recorded corpora of child speech, and I have explored in more detail the acquisition of past participles through experimental work with individual children.