Martha Stone Palmer

Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science

University of Pennsylvania, PA19104-6389

215-898-9513, 215-898-0587 (fax),

Degrees

University of Pennsylvania, Sloan Fellow, NLP, Aravind Joshi & Bonnie Webber

University of Edinburgh: 1985 PhD, Artificial Intelligence,

Driving Semantics for Limited Domains, Alan Bundy, Adviser

University of Texas: 1976 MA, Computer Science, 1972 BA, Philosophy

Professional Employment:

Associate Prof: Dept. of Computer and Information Science, U. of Pennsylvania, (99/present)

Director of Technology, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, Penn (96/98)

Adjunct Associate Prof: Department of Computer and Information Science, Penn (93/98)

Associate Research Prof: Dept. of Computer and Information Sci, U. of Delaware (93/94)

Visiting Sr. Fellow: Dept. of Information Systems and CS, National U of Singapore, (90/93)

Sr. Research Scientist, (Manager 84/85), Logic-Based Systems Group, Unisys Corp, (83/90)

Visiting Lecturer, Computer Science Department, DukeUniversity, (79/80)

Brief Research Summary: PhD research at Edinburgh in natural language processing involved a Prolog meta-interpreter implementation of a semantic interpretation system based on verb-argument structures. This formed the basis for the semantic/pragmatic component of the Pundit text understanding system developed at Unisys. Current research is aimed at building domain-independent and language independent techniques for semantic interpretation based on linguistically annotated data used for training supervised systems. This includes computational lexical semantics, specifically cross-linguistic verb semantics, machine translation, natural language processing systems, artificial intelligence, and logic programming.

Selected Professional Activities and Honors:

Linguistic Resource development: Penn Chinese Treebank I, (250K word, released March,2003) Penn Korean/English parallel Treebank, (ea 50K words, Dec, 2001), English Proposition Bank, (1M words, ETA, Dec, 2003), VerbNet (4000 English verbs, beta-test, June, 2003), Chinese Proposition Bank (250K words, June, 2004)

Co-Chair ACL-96, ACL-Exec Member, (1990-1992), AMTA-Exec Member (1997-1999), NAACL-Exec (1999-2001), DARPA-TIDES Advisory Committee, (1999-2001).

US coordinator for ISLE: International Standards for Language Engineering, (NSF/EU).

ACL Special Interest Group on the Lexicon – SIGLEX, Chair, 1996 –2000, and Co-

Chair, Senseval98, Senseval01 (International Word Sense Disambiguation exercises).

ACL: Special Interest Group in Chinese Language Processing, SIGHAN, Chair 2001 – 2003.

ACL Vice-President-Elect, 2003 (Vice President, 2004, President, 2005).

Related Publications

  • Martha Palmer, Hoa Dang and Christiane Fellbaum, Making Fine-grained and Coarse-grained sense distinctions, both manually and automatically, accepted by the Journal of Natural Language Engineering, revisions due March, 2003.
  • Dan Gildea and Martha Palmer, The Necessity of Parsing for Predicate-Argument Recognition, The 40th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL-02, Philadelphia, PA, July 7-12, 2002.
  • Paul Kingsbury, Martha Palmer, From TreeBank to PropBank, Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-02, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain, May 28- June 3, 2002.
  • Fei Xia, Chunghye Han, Martha Palmer, and Aravind Joshi, Automatically Extracting and Comparing Lexicalized Grammars for Different Languages, Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (IJCAI-2001), Seattle Washington, 2001.
  • Chunghye Han, Benoit Lavoie, Martha Palmer, Owen Rambow, Richard Kittredge, Tanya Korelsky, Nari Kim and Myunghee Kim, Handling Structural Divergences and Recovering Dropped Arguments in a Korean/English Machine Translation SystemProceedings of the Association for Machine Translation in the Arnericas 2000, Publishcd in Lecture Notes in AI series of Springer Verlag, 8 pg., October 10-14. 2000.

Other Publications:

  • Matthew Stone, Christine Doran, Bonnie Webber, Tonia Bleam and Martha Palmer, Microplanning with Communicative Intentions: The SPUD System, Computational Intelligence 19(4):1-75, November, 2003.
  • Nianwen Xue, Fei Xia, Fu-dong Chiou, Martha Palmer, The Penn Chinese TreeBank: A Phrase Structure Analysis Approach, Natural Language Engineering, 10(4):1-30, June, 2004.
  • Karin Kipper, Hoa Trang Dang, Martha Palmer, Class-Based Construction of a Verb Lexicon.Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence,AAAI-2000, Austin TX, July 30 - August 3, 2000.
  • Karin Kipper and Martha Palmer, Representation of Actions as an Interlingua, Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Applied Interlinguas, held in conjunction with ANLP-NAACL 2000, 6 pg. Seattle, WA., April, 2000.
  • Norm Badler, Martha Palmer and Rama Bindiganavale, Animation Control for Real-Time Virtual Humans. Communications of the ACM, 42(8), August 1999, pp. 65-73.

Current PhD Students: (Total - 9) Tom Morton, (2003), Hoa Trang Dang, (2004), Karin Kipper, (2004), Susan Converse, (2004), Szuting Yi, Jinying Chen, Edward Loper, Yuan Ding, Matt Huenarfarth

Previous Students: William Schuler, (2003),Fei Xia (PhD, 2001, Penn),Hyun Seok Park, MS, Penn, Gan Kok Wee, PhD, National University of Singapore (NUS) Zhibiao Wu, Phd, NUS

Selected Collaborators Outside of Penn: Nicoletta Calzolari, (Pisa), Christiane Fellbuam, (Princeton), Ralph Grishman, (NYU), Chung-hye Han, (Simon Fraser), Adam Kilgarriff, (Brighton), Richard Kittredge, Tanya Korelsky, Myunghee Kim, Benoit Lavoie, (CoGenTex, Inc)}, Marc Light (Mitre), Alexis Nasr, Owen Rambow, (Columbia), Gay Washburn, (Mich), Susanne Wolfe, Antonio Zampolli, (Pisa)

Postgraduate Scholar Sponsor (Total – 9): Dan Gildea, Chunghye Han,Nari Kim, Seth Kulick, Yoo-Jin Moon, Jong Park,Juntae Yoon, Nianwen Xue, Paul Kingsbury