Lucas Champollion

I am a postdoctoral researcher (wissenschaftlicher Angestellter) at the Tübinger Zentrum für Linguistik (TüZLi) at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. I will be an assistant professor at the NYU Department of Linguistics in New York starting Fall 2012.

I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2010. From 2009 to summer 2010 I was a visiting researcher at the Natural Language Theory and Technology Group at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) and an exchange scholar at the Department of Linguistics at Stanford.

I successfully defended my dissertation on July 2, 2010. My thesis advisors were 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. For anyone interested in what this means in plain language: 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.

If you are a linguist, here's a more concrete description of what I do. The primary purpose of my current research in formal semantics lies in connecting and unifying a number of research domains under the general heading of distributivity. These domains are:

• (a) plurals and mass terms;
• (b) inner aspect and telicity;
• (c) degrees and measurement.

Although some parallels between domains (a) and (b) have been noted previously, much theoretical work considers phenomena in each of these domains separately. Analyses of these phenomena that ignore these connections are therefore exposed to the risk of missed generalizations and duplication of efforts. My dissertation provides a unified theory of these three domains.

Address

Lucas Champollion
Zi. 3.11
Tübinger Zentrum für Linguistik
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Nauklerstr. 35
72074 Tübingen
Germany

My CV

PDF

Dissertation

Research Interests

Publications

Refereed journal papers:

• Champollion, Lucas (2011). Lexicalized non-local MCTAG with dominance links is NP-complete. In: Journal of Logic, Language, and Information, 20(3): 343-359. Online at SpringerLink. Pre-print version: PDF.


• 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.

Refereed conference proceedings papers:

• Champollion, Lucas (2010). Quantification and negation in event semantics. In: The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, Vol. 6. Formal Semantics and Pragmatics: Discourse, Context, and Models, Jurgis Skilters et al. (eds.) 2010. PDF


• Champollion, Lucas, and Uli Sauerland (2010). Move and accommodate: A solution to Haddock's puzzle. In: Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 8, Olivier Bonami and Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (eds.) 2010. PDF
  
  
  • Slides from the presentation: PDF


• Champollion, Lucas (2010). Cumulative readings of every do not provide evidence for events and thematic roles. In: M. Aloni, H. Bastiaanse, T. de Jager, and K. Schulz, editors, Logic, Language and Meaning, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 213-222. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2010 (Proceedings of the 17th Amsterdam Colloquium, December 16-18, 2009). PDF (Final postproceedings version.)
  
  
  • Slides from the presentation: PDF

Conference proceedings (refereed abstracts):

• Champollion, Lucas (2011). Each vs. jeweils: A cover-based view on distance-distributivity. 2011 Amsterdam Colloquium (December 19-21, 2011). Pre-Proceedings version -- do not cite.
  Paper: PDF


• Champollion, Lucas (2009). A unified account of distributivity, for-adverbials, and pseudopartitives. Proceedings of the 14th Sinn und Bedeutung conference, pp. 84-100. Vienna, September 28-30, 2009.
  
  
  • Paper: PDF (updated May 3 2010 for typos and minor edits)
  • Materials from the presentation: Slides (PDF)    Handout (PDF, 6 slides per page)


• 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, 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

Other presentations:

• Champollion, Lucas (2010). Quantification in event semantics. Presented at the 6th International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication. Formal Semantics and Pragmatics: Discourse, Context, and Models. November 19-21. Riga, Latvia. Superseded by "Quantification and negation in event semantics", see above.


• Champollion, Lucas (2010). for-adverbials and the specified quantity generalization. Presented at the 34th Penn Linguistics Colloquium. University of Pennsylvania, March 19-21, 2010.Handout (PDF) (Superseded by my dissertation.)


• Champollion, Lucas, and Uli Sauerland (2009). An inverse linking account of nested definites. Presentation at the 14th Sinn und Bedeutung conference, Vienna, September 28-30, 2009. Slides (PDF)    Handout (PDF, 6 slides per page)
  Also presented at the Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris (CSSP, September 23-25, 2009) under the title "Move and accommodate: A solution to Haddock's Puzzle". See above for the proceedings paper.


• 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) (Superseded by "An inverse linking account of nested definites", Sinn und Bedeutung 2009, see above.)


• Champollion, Lucas (2009). for-adverbials quantify over subintervals, not subevents. Presentation at the CHRONOS 9 international conference on tense, aspect and modality, Paris, September 2-4, 2009. Slides (PDF)(Superseded by my dissertation.)


• 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 (2007). Lexicalized non-local MCTAG with dominance links is NP-complete. Mathematics of Language 10, UCLA, July 28-30, 2007, Los Angeles, USA. PDF(Superseded by the 2011 JoLLI paper.)
  
  
  • Handout from the MOL talk with sample derivation. PDF


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

Nonrefereed contributions:

• Sui, Yanyan, and Lucas Champollion (2010). Chinese "dou" and cumulative quantification. Poster at the Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning (MACSIM) workshop, University of Pennsylvania, April 10, 2010. Poster: PPTX PDF


• 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) (Superseded by "Cumulative readings of every do not provide evidence for events and thematic roles." See above.)


• 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.

Invited talks:

• Temporal prepositional phrases and implicit variables. Workshop in honor of Arnim von Stechow. University of Konstanz, November 2011. Handout (PDF)


• For-adverbials and the scope of indefinites. Workshop "Indefinites and beyond". University of Güttingen, November 2011. Handout (PDF)


• The scope of for-adverbials: A reply to Deo and Pinango. Workshop on aspect and modality in lexical semantics. University of Stuttgart, September 2011. Handout (PDF)


• The common core of distributivity, aspect, and measurement. Talk given at various occasions (dissertation summary). Handout (PDF)


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

• Champollion, Lucas, and Maya Ravindranath (2006). The formal semantics of positive and negative anymore. Manuscript.


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

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.

Dissertation proposal: Aspect, plurality and quantification

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

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.