Lucas Champollion

I'm a 5th year Ph.D. student at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, currently a visiting researcher at the Natural Language Theory and Technology Group at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) and an exchange student at the Department of Linguistics at Stanford.

My thesis advisors are Cleo Condoravdi at PARC and Stanford, and Aravind K. Joshi at Penn. 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 and of natural language formal semantics, focusing on theoretical and computational semantics. What this means is this: As a computational linguist, I try to teach computers how to read, and how to figure out what it means that they read. As a formal semanticist, I try to translate every word to a math expression so that when you put together all the words in a sentence, you get a larger math expression that is true if the sentence is true, and false if the sentence is false. I do this in order to find the precise meaning of certain words and the way these meanings come together in sentences.

Email:

My CV: PDF

Research Interests:

Dissertation proposal: Aspect, plurality and quantification

Publications

Journal 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.

Conference proceedings:

• Champollion, Lucas (2008). Binding theory in LTAG. Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and related formalisms (TAG+9), Tübingen, Germany. PDF
  
  
  • Slides from the presentation: PPT, PDF


• 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 (MOL) 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

Invited talks:

• Champollion, Lucas (2009). A unified account of nominal distributivity, for-adverbials, and measure phrases. Stanford University, April 2009. Handout (PDF)

Conference/workshop presentations:

• Champollion, Lucas (2009). Davidsonian events and thematic roles: are they necessary? A reply to Kratzer and Schein. Presentation at the workshop on Language, Communication and Rational Agency, Stanford, May 30-31, 2009. Slides (PDF)


• Champollion, Lucas, and Uli Sauerland (2009). Definiteness, inverse linking, and narrowing. Presentation at the Tenth Semantic Fest, Stanford University, March 13-14, 2009. Handout (PDF)


• Champollion, Lucas (2008). The influence of goals on ambiguities in certain donkey sentences. Presentation at the Fourth Formal Semantics in Moscow workshop (FSIM 4), April 5-6, 2008. Handout (PDF)


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

Manuscripts:

• 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.

Selected linguistics links

Completely different stuff

My Erdős number is 4:

• Aronov, B.; Erdős, P.; Goddard, W.; Kleitman, D. J.; Klugerman, M.; Pach, J.; Schulman, L. J. Crossing families. Combinatorica 14 (1994), no. 2, 127--134.
• Agarwal, Pankaj K.; Aggarwal, Alok; Aronov, B.; Kosaraju, S. Rao; Schieber, Baruch; Suri, Subhash Computing external farthest neighbors for a simple polygon. First Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (Montreal, PQ, 1989). Discrete Appl. Math. 31 (1991), no. 2, 97--111.
• Joshi, A. K.; Kosaraju, S. R.; Yamada, H. M. String adjunct grammars. I. Local and distributed adjunction. Information and Control 21 (1972), 93--116.
• Shen, L.; Champollion, L.; Joshi, A.K. LTAG-spinal and the Treebank: A new resource for incremental, dependency and semantic parsing. Language Resources and Evaluation, 42 (2008), no. 1, 1--19.