Lucas Champollion

Welcome to my homepage.

I'm a 4th year Ph.D. student at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. I received a Master of Science in Engineering from Penn's Department of Computer and Information Science in 2007.

I'm a student of

computational linguistics, focusing on

computational semantics. What this means is I'm trying (with many other people) to teach computers how to read, and how to figure out what it means that they read. It might take the field some time to figure out how to do this. So in the meantime, to keep myself busy, I read and write by myself (and with other people on occasion). Some of my papers and computer programs are listed below.

My address:

Lucas Champollion
Department of Linguistics
619 Williams Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
USA

This is only a postal address, not an office.

Spring 2008 Office Hours: Williams Hall 402 (4th floor), Tuesdays 11am-12noon

Email:

My CV: PDF

Research Interests:

Formal properties of Tree-adjoining Grammar (TAG) and its variants, underspecfied semantics, dependency parsing, game theoretic semantics

Papers:

Shen, Libin, Lucas Champollion, and Aravind K. Joshi (2008). LTAG-spinal and the Treebank: A new resource for incremental, dependency and semantic parsing. Language Resources and Evaluation, 42(1):1-19. Online at SpringerLink. Pre-print version: PDF. See also the website to this paper.

Champollion, Lucas, Joshua Tauberer, and Maribel Romero (2007). "The Penn Lambda Calculator: Pedagogical Software for Natural Language Semantics", in T. Holloway King and E. M. Bender (eds.), Proceedings of the Grammar Engineering across Frameworks (GEAF) 2007 Workshop. Stanford, CA, July 13-15 2007. CSLI On-line Publications. [PDF]
See also the homepage of the software application described in this paper.

Champollion, Lucas (2007). Lexicalized non-local MCTAG with dominance links is NP-complete. Proceedings of Mathematics of Language 10, UCLA. Ed. by Gerald Penn and Ed Stabler. CSLI On-Line Publications. PDF
Handout from the MOL talk with sample derivation. PDF

Champollion, Lucas, Prashanth Mannem, and Livio Robaldo (2007). Bidirectional dependency parsing trained on the Turin University Treebank. Proceedings of the EVALITA 2007 Workshop. Rome, Italy, September 10th, 2007. Special issue of Intelligenza Artifiziale, volume IV(2), pages 48-49. PDF

Champollion, Lucas (2006). On the (ir)relevance of psycholinguistics for anaphora resolution. Workshop on ambiguity in anaphora, ESSLLI 2006, Málaga, Spain. PDF

Champollion, Lucas, and Maya Ravindranath (2006). The formal semantics of positive and negative anymore. Manuscript. (Please email me for this paper.)

Champollion, Lucas (2006). A game-theoretic account of adjective ordering restrictions. Manuscript. PDF

Teaching:

Spring 2007 and 2008: Introduction to Natural Language Processing (CIS 530) with Prof. Mitch Marcus
Fall 2005: Introduction to Formal Linguistics (LING 106) with Prof. Maribel Romero

Software:

The Penn Lambda Calculator is an interactive, graphical, pedagogical computer program that helps students of formal semantics practice the typed lambda calculus. (Joint work with Josh Tauberer and Maribel Romero. Much more information can be found on the application's web site or in the paper listed above as Champollion, Tauberer and Romero 2007.)

Java API for the LTAG-spinal treebank. Follow the link for download information or browse Javadoc online.

tblplus.zip: a transformation-based system that learns historical spelling changes. Note: The version that can be downloaded here isn't functional unless fntbl is installed on the same computer and some paths in the scripts are adapted.

This project grew out of the necessity to produce an automatic morphological analysis for Middle French, with the ultimate goal of contributing to the production of a Middle French Treebank (by Tony Kroch). Since morphological analyzers are readily available for Modern French, I used transformation-based learning to convert the spelling of Middle French texts to make them look as similar to Modern French as possible with respect to morphology.

The tool is installed on alpha.nlp.liniac.upenn.edu in the directory /home/champoll/tblplus. Check out the README file for a more detailed description of the project.

Completely different stuff

Tension by Billy Collins: A poem I like

Progress tracker for a bill that would allow Penn grad students to unionize:

SUBTLE wiki