Preferred contact method
@emilymbender
Office hours (Spring-Autumn 2018)
By appointment only
Office:
Guggenheim 414C map


About Me
My primary research interests are in multilingual grammar engineering, the study of variation, both within and across languages, and the relationship between linguistics and computational linguistics. My grammar engineering work centers on the LinGO Grammar Matrix, an open-source starter kit for the development of broad-coverage precision HPSG grammars. My language interests include English [eng] (including AAVE), Japanese [jpn], Wambaya [wmb], Chintang [ctn], ASL [ase], and Mandarin [cmn]. The AGGREGATION project is investigating the automatic creation of grammars from IGT with the Grammar Matrix for the benefit of language documentation.
The Grammar Matrix is developed in the context of the DELPH-IN consortium, and Matrix-derived grammars are compatible with the DELPH-IN suite of open-source tools. The Grammar Matrix itself represents an approach to computational linguistic typology, using computational methodology to combine depth of formal methods (creating grammars which map surface strings to semantic representations) with the breadth of typological investigation (attempting to cover the known range of variants across languages for each phenomenon we approach).
I am also interested in sociolinguistic variation, or the ways in which speakers manipulate the possibilities allowed by their languages to create style and register. This interest led to my involvement in the LiCORICE project, investigating the ways in which speakers express and deploy claims to authority and align with or against interlocutors. My dissertation (available online) explored how competence grammar can accommodate the relationship between non-categorical constraints on sociolinguistic variation and social meaning.
As for the interaction between linguistics and computational linguistics, I'm interested in both how linguistic knowledge can be deployed to improve the performance of NLP systems and how computational methods can serve the purposes of linguistic analysis. I am the LSA's delegate to the ACL and maintain the Cyberling blog. My 2013 book Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax aims to present linguistic concepts in an manner accessible to NLP practitioners.
I have a been a member of the faculty at the University of Washington since 2003. I am currently a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. I am usually the faculty director of the CLMS program and the director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory, but my colleague Fei Xia has taken over these duties while I am on sabbatical Spring-Autumn 2018. I am the past Chair (2016-2017) of the Executive Board of NAACL as well as a member of the ICCL (the committee responsible for Coling).
Prior to coming to UW, I held temporary positions at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, and worked in industry at YY Technologies. I received my PhD from the Linguistics Department at Stanford University, where I joined the HPSG and LinGO projects at CSLI. My AB (also in Linguistics) is from UC Berkeley, and I've also studied at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.
In 2012, LINGUIST List asked me to write an essy about how I came to be a linguist and in 2018, the LSA interviewed me for their member spotlight feature. My pronouns are she/her and my Erdős number is 4.
Up-coming workshops/events
- Tutorial at ACL 2018: 100 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Semantics & Pragmatics But Were Afraid to Ask
- COLING 2018 (of which I am PC co-chair, with Leon Derczynski)
Projects
- Grammar Matrix
- AGGREGATION
- Language CoLLAGE
- ERG Semantic Documentation
- EL-STEC: Endangered Languages--Shared Task Evaluation Challenge
- LiCORICE
- Cyberling blog
Students
PhD Students
- Joshua Crowgey
- David Inman
- Ned Letcher (U. Melbourne)
- Angelina McMillan-Major
- Woodley Packard
- Kristen Howell
- Glenn Slayden
- Olga Zamaraeva
MA/MS Students
PhDs completed
- Michael Goodman 2018 Semantic Operations for Transfer-based Machine Translation
- Anstke Fokkens 2014 Enhancing Empirical Research for Linguistically Motivated Precision Grammars (U. Saarlandes)
- Sanghoun Song 2014 A Grammar Library for Information Structure
- Steven Moran 2012 Phonetics Information Base and Lexicon
- David Goss-Grubbs 2010 Deep Processing for a Portable Natural Language Interface to Databases
- Scott Drellishak 2009 Widespread but Not Universal: Improving the Typological Coverage of the Grammar Matrix
MSs completed
- Chris Curtis (CLMS) 2018 A Parametric Implementation of Valence-changing Morphoplogy in the LinGO Grammar Matrix
- Mike Haeger (CLMS) 2017 An Evidentiality Library for the LinGO Grammar Matrix
- Michael Lockwood (CLMS) 2016 Automated Gloss Mapping for Inferring Grammatical Properties
- Woodley Packard (CLMS) 2015 Full Forest Treebanking
- TJ Trimble (CLMS) 2014 Adjectives in the LinGO Grammar Matrix
- David Wax (CLMS) 2014 Automated Grammar Engineering for Verbal Morphology
- Megan Schneider (CLMS) 2013 Comparative Analysis of DeepBank and the Penn Treebank
- Zina Pozen (CLMS) 2013 Using Lexical and Compositional Semantics to Improve HPSG Parse Selection
- Francesca Gola (CLMS) 2012 An Analysis of Translation Divergence Patterns using PanLex Translation Pairs
- Glenn Slayden (CLMS) 2012 Array TFS Storage for Unification Grammars
- Matt Hohensee (CLMS) 2012 It's Only Morpho-Logical: Modeling Agreement in Cross-linguistic Dependency Parsing
MAs completed
- Varya Gracheva 2013 Markers of Contrast in Russian: A Corpus-Based Study
- Joshua Crowgey 2012 The Syntactic Exponence of Sentential Negation: A Model for the LinGO Grammar Matrix
- Safiyyah Saleem (CLMA) 2010. Argument Optionality: A New Library for the Grammar Matrix Customization System
- Michael Goodman (CLMA) 2009 Egad: Efficiently Evaluating and Extracting Errors from Deep Grammars.
- Kelly O'Hara (CLMA) 2008 A Morphotactic Infrastructure for a Grammar Customization System
- Laurie Poulson 2006 Evaluating a Cross-Linguistic Grammar Model: Methodology and Test-Suite Resource Development
Last modified: