I’m now a Senior Research Scientist at Thorn, after a great postdoc with Andrew McCallum in UMass, working with all the great people at IESL!
My PhD was in Linguistics at CU-Boulder, working with Martha Palmer and Laura Michaelis. My dissertation focused on implicit roles (inferring unstated participants of events )from both a computational and theoretical perspective.
My general focus is semantic representation – arriving at structured graphs which capture all the complex things that humans understand about a discourse, particularly how the events and participants interacts. My primary background is this has been linguistic – designing and building supervised corpora that handle semantic phenomena – and I have also started to pivot into supervised learning of these issues (i.e. semantic graph parsing, event-event relation detection) and unsupervised learning of semantic representations. I also care a great deal about grounding out semantic representations into interpretable, cross-linguistically robust representations (linguistically I’m a fan of functional-adaptive, construction-grammatical approaches to language) and thinking about how to reconcile those theories with the current deep contextual representations of language we are get from NLP.
Selected corpora I’ve developed or co-developed
- The Richer Event Description corpus: A corpus of event coreference (and normal entity coreference), with temporal and causal annotation. This was developed as a gold-standard representation of capturing temporal and event structure in documents. data guidelines paper
- The Multi-sentence AMR corpus: A subset of the Abstract Meaning Representation project annotated with document-level anaphoric, bridging, and implicit role information. [date forthcoming (next AMR release)]guidelines paper poster
- The Unified Propbank: An expansion of English Propbank, bringing the predicate and role inventory in line with the Abstract Meaning Representation corpus and dramatically expanding coverage over nouns and adjectives. project website paper
Publications are in my semantic scholar profile