Special Computational Linguistics Colloquium

October 10, 2003, 11:30am, AVW Room 2120

A recent consensus on a task-oriented level of semantic representation to be layered on top of the existing Penn Treebank syntactic structures has been achieved. This level, know as the Proposition Bank, or PropBank, consists of argument labels for the semantic roles of individual verbs and similar predicating expressions such as participial modifiers and nominalizations. This talk will describe the PropBank verb semantic role annotation being done at Penn for English, Chinese and Korean. The annotation process will be discussed as well as the use of existing lexical resources such as WordNet, Levin classes and VerbNet. Similar projects include the FrameNet Project at Berkeley and the Prague Tectogrammatics project. PropBank annotation is shallower than the Prague Tectogrammatics project and more broad coverage than FrameNet, in that every verb instance in the corpus has to be annotated.

The potential use of this level of annotation as an interlingua for Machine Translation will also be discussed.

About the speakers:

Professor Martha Palmer is in the Computer and Information Sciences Department of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science.  She has been actively involved in research in Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation for over twenty years, beginning with her graduate work at the University of Edinburgh on the use of Lexical Conceptual Structures as predicate argument structures for driving the semantic interpretation process.  This lexically based semantic interpretation process was continued during a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania and formed the basis of the successful DARPA-funded text processing system, Pundit, which she built at Unisys during the 80's.  This system integrated semantic and pragmatic processing in innovative ways that enabled sophisticated reference resolution and temporal analysis.  During her three year visit to the National University of Singapore she began applying these same techniques to the task of English to Chinese Machine Translation, and has continued this research since returning to Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania in 1993.

She is now broadening her interest in lexical semantics to include cross-linguistic verb classifications and is involved in building a Chinese TreeBank and an English Proposition Bank for the Department of Defense and a Korean/English Machine Translation system for the US Army.  She is the coordinator for American involvement in ISLE, International Standards for Language Engineering, the Chair of a new ACL Special Interest Group in Chinese Language Processing, SIGHAN, and one of the coordinators of SENSEVAL-1 and SENSEVAL-2. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee for the DARPA TIDES program, (Trans-lingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization), and the Chair of SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon.  She was previously on the Executive Committee for the North American Association of Computational Linguistics, the Executive Committee of the Association of Machine Translation for the Americas and the Executive Committee of the Association of Computational Linguistics, as well as Co-Program Chair of ACL-96.

For the colloquium series schedule, see the UMD Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series web page at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/cl_colloquium/. If you are interested in meeting with the speaker, please contact Doug Oard (oard@umiacs.umd.edu).