Paola Merlo

Maître d'enseignement et de recherche

Bio

I am co-head of the newly started interdisciplinary research group Computational Learning and Computational Linguistics (CLCL) and a member of the Laboratory for Analysis and Technology of Language (LATL) .
I studied theoretical linguistics at the University of Venice, under the guidance of Guglielmo Cinque. I hold a doctorate in Computational Linguistics from the University of Maryland, USA. My advisor was Amy Weinberg. I have been at the University of Geneva since 1992. I spent two years as an associate research fellow at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as six months at the University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics.

Current and Past Research Topics

• Function and Semantic Role Parsing
• Corpus-based Techniques for the Acquisition of Verb's Argument Structure applied to Several Languages
• Corpus-based Accounts of PP Attachment Ambiguity Resolution
• Hybrid Document Representations for Automatic Document Clustering
• Architecture and Frequency in Human Acquisition and Sentence Processing

• Learning Verb Meaning
• Computational Learning in Adaptive Systems for Spoken Conversation
• Multi-lingual Propagation of Syntactic and Semantic Role Annotation

Teaching

• BA7 INFO Méthodes empiriques et langages de script Mercredi 12-14 L208
• MA2 INFO Méthodes empiriques en linguistique informatique: Traduction Automatique Statistique Mercredi 16-18 L208
• MA3 INFO Lectures d'articles scientifiques Lundi 16-18 A210

Books

• Merlo P., Parsing with Principles and Classes of Information, Kluwer Academic Publishers , 1996.

• P. Merlo and S. Stevenson, Eds. (2002). The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing: Formal, Computational and Experimental Issues. (Selected papers from the 11th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.) Natural Language Processing (NLP) Series, John Benjamins Publishers, Amsterdam.

• Harry Bunt, Paola Merlo and Joakim Nivre, Eds. (to appear)). Trends in Parsing Technology, Springer Verlag.

Journal and Conference Publications

• P. Merlo and L. van der Plas (2009), "Abstraction and Generalisation in Semantic Role Labels: PropBank, VerbNet or both?", Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2009, Singapore.(pdf file)

• I. Titov, J. Henderson, P. Merlo and G. Musillo (2009), "Online Graph Planarisation for Synchronous Parsing of Semantic and Syntactic Dependencies", Proceedings of IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, CA. (pdf file)

• Gesmundo A., J. Henderson, P. Merlo and I. Titov (2009) "A Latent Variable Model of Synchronous Syntactic-Semantic Parsing for Multiple Languages" Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Learning (CONLL 2009), Shared Task, Boulder, CO.(pdf file)

• Lonneke van der Plas, James Henderson and Paola Merlo (2009) "Domain adaptation with artificial data for semantic parsing of speech", Proceedings of NAACL 2009, short paper, Boulder,CO.(pdf file)

• Merlo P., G. Musillo (2008) "Semantic Parsing for High-Precision Semantic Role Labelling", CONLL 2008 (pdf file)

• Henderson, J. Paola Merlo, Gabriele Musillo and Ivan Titov (2008) "A Latent Variable Model of Synchronous Parsing for Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies", CONLL 08 shared task (pdf file)

• Gabriele Musillo and Paola Merlo (2008) "Unlexicalised Hidden Variable Models of Split Dependency Grammars", ACL 2008 (pdf file)

• Merlo P., E. Esteve Ferrer (2006) "The Notion of Argument in PP Attachment", Computational Linguistics 32(2). (pdf file)

• G. Musillo, P. Merlo (2006) "Accurate Parsing of the Proposition Bank" NAACL 2006 (pdf file)

• G. Musillo, P. Merlo (2006) " Robust Parsing of the Proposition Bank" ROMAND, EACL 2006 workshop, Trento (pdf file)

• Merlo P., G. Musillo (2005) "Accurate Function Parsing", EMNLP 2005, Vancouver, Canada, 620--627. (pdf file)

• G. Musillo, P. Merlo (2005) "Lexical and Structural Biases for Function Parsing", IWPT 2005, Vancouver, Canada, 83--93. (pdf file)

• G. Musillo, P. Merlo (2005) "Assigning Function Labels to Unparsed Text", RANLP 2005, Borovetz, Bulgaria, 340--347. (pdf file)

• P. Merlo S. Stevenson (2004) "Structure and Frequency in Verb Classification", Incontro di Grammatica Generativa, Venice, Italy. (pdf file)

• P. Merlo (2003) "Generalised PP-attachment Disambiguation using Corpus-based Linguistic Diagnostics", EACL, Budapest, Hungary, 251--258. (pdf file)

• P. Merlo, J. Henderson, G. Schneider and E. Wehrli (2003), ``Learning Document Similarity using NLP'', Linguistik-online

• S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (2002). ``Words, numbers and all that: the lexicon in sentence understanding.'' In P. Merlo and S. Stevenson, Eds., The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing: Formal, Computational and Experimental Issues, 1-38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Introduction to edited volume)

• Merlo P., S. Stevenson, V. Tsang and G. Allaria (2002) "A Multilingual Paradigm for Automatic Verb Classification", Procs. of the 40th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'02). (ps file)

• Merlo P and S. Stevenson (2001) "Automatic Verb Classification based on Statistical Distribution of Argument Structure", Computational Linguistics,  27:3, pp. 373--408.  (pdf file)

• Merlo P. and M. Leybold  (2001) " Automatic Distinction of Arguments and Modifiers: the Case of Prepositional Phrases", Workshop on Computational Language  Learning (Connl 2001), Toulouse, France.  (postscript )

• Stevenson S. and P. Merlo, (2000) "Automatic Lexical Acquisition Based on Statistical Distributions", COLING 2000, Saarbruecken, Germany. (postscript)

• Merlo P. and S. Stevenson (2000), ``Lexical Syntax and Parsing Architecture'', Architecture and Mechanisms of Sentence Processing, M. Crocker, M. Pickering e C. Clifton (eds.), Cambridge University Press. (version postscript)

• Merlo P. and S.Stevenson (1999). ``Language Acquisition and Ambiguity Resolution: The Role of Frequency Distributions.'' Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Vancouver, Canada, August, 1999. (postscript)

• Stevenson S., P.Merlo, N.Kariaeva, and K.Whitehouse (1999). ``Supervised Learning of Lexical Semantic Verb Classes Using Frequency Distributions.'' Proceedings of SigLex99: Standardizing Lexical Resources. College Park, Maryland, June, 1999. (postscript)

• Stevenson S. and P.Merlo (1999). ``Automatic Verb Classification Using Grammatical Features.'' Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics\/},45--52. Bergen, Norway, June, 1999. (postscript)

• Berthouzoz C. et P. Merlo (1998), ``Statistical Ambiguity Resolution for Grammar-based Parsing'', Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing: Selected Papers from RANLP'97, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Nicolas Nicolov et Ruslan Mitkov (eds.), John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. (postscript)

• Merlo P. et S. Stevenson (1998), ``What Grammars Tell Us about Corpora: the Case of Reduced Relative Clauses'', Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Very Large Corpora, Montreal, CA, 134--142. (postscript)

• Barbero C., Lombardo V., Lesmo L. et P. Merlo (1998), ``Integration of Syntactic and Lexical Information in a Hierarchical Dependency Grammar'', Proceedings of the Workshop on Processing of Dependency-based Grammars, Montreal, CA, 58--67.

• Stevenson S. and P. Merlo (1997). ``Lexical Structure and Parsing Complexity.'' Language and Cognitive Processes,12: 2, 1997.

• Merlo P., Crocker M., and Berthouzoz C.,`` Attaching Multiple Prepositional Phrases: Generalized Backed-Off Estimation", Proceedings of the Second Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Providence, RI, 1997. (available from the cmp-lg archives.)

• Berthouzoz C. and P. Merlo``Statistical Ambiguity Resolution for Principle-based Parsing', Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP-97), Bulgaria, 1997.

• Berthouzoz C. and P. Merlo ``Filtrage Structurel versus Filtrage Statistique: Expériences sur la Résolution de l'Ambiguïté Syntaxique. Actes des 1ères JST FRANCIL, pp 353-359, Avignon, 1997.

• Merlo P.,"Grammatica Modulare e Parsing ", Sistemi Intelligenti, 8(1), 99--121, 1996.

• Merlo P.,"Modularity and Information Content Classes in Principle-based Parsing", Computational Linguistics, 21(4), 515-541, 1995.

• Merlo P. (1994),``A Corpus-based Analysis of Verb Continuation Frequencies for Sentence Processing." Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Special Issue on Sentence Processing, 23(6), 435--457.

• Merlo P. (1989),``Risultative in Italiano ed Inglese." Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, 14, 29--55.

Data

Experiments and materials described in LREC 2000
 

• Experiment 1
• Experiment 2