2137 McGill Hall
(858) 822-4904

What is it?

The computational linguistics lab is part of the Department of Linguistics at UCSD, and is supervised by Andy Kehler. It serves two primary purposes:

• Computational linguistics research: Students specializing in computational linguistics take advantage of the lab facilities in pursuing their research.
• Empirical grounding of linguistic theory: Students who wish to ground their linguistic theories though empirical investigations using natural language corpora are encouraged to use the lab facilities for this purpose.

• Machines: The lab currently houses six high-powered Linux machines, and one G4 MacIntosh.
• Data: The lab has a large set of natural language corpora, both annotated and unannotated, in text, speech, and database form, and in a variety of natural languages. Search tools are also available (e.g., tgrep).

Research Projects

• Machine Learning Approaches to Discourse Interpretation

  My students and I are currently applying maximum entropy models, naive bayesian models, neural nets, and unsupervised bootstrapping methods to identify the antecedents of pronouns in unrestricted data using a wide range of contextual features. This work is funded by a grant from the National Security Agency.

  Future projects under development will apply a combination of symbolic processing and machine learning techniques to problems such as inter-eventuality temporal relation recognition and coherence relation classification.

• Empirically-Driven Theories of Reference and Cognitive Status

  With Gregory Ward at Northwestern University, we are currently analyzing various types of demonstrative reference in English as they occur in different corpora of naturally-occurring data, and developing new theories of the information they encode about the cognitive status of referent in terms of the hearer's belief state. UCSD's work was previously funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Students

• Lara Taylor
• Henry Beecher
• Laura Kertz
• Hannah Rohde
• Karen Tanenbaum

• Alex Simma (now a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley)

• Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) page, and the North American Chapter (NAACL) page
• The ACL Anthology of on-line published materials
• The Linguistic Data Consortium
• The Natural Language Software Registry
• UCSD Phonetics Lab
• UCSD Language and Brain Lab
• UCSD Linguistics Department