Lucas Champollion

Welcome to my homepage.


I'm a 6th 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 scholar 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.

Philadelphia address:

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

California address:

Lucas Champollion
NLTT/ISL
Palo Alto Research Center
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
USA

PARC office contact:

Room 2632
Phone: (650) 812-4912
Fax: (650) 812-4374



Email:

My CV: PDF


Specialization:

Model-theoretic semantics; natural language processing; formal language theory

Research Interests:



Dissertation proposal: Aspect, plurality and quantification

Update: The proposal is superseded by the talks on distributivity, for-adverbials, and events below.

My dissertation proposal consists of:


Publications

Refereed journal papers:

Conference proceedings:

Invited talks:

Conference/workshop presentations:

Manuscripts:

(Please email me for these papers.)

Teaching:


Software:

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.


Selected linguistics links

Mark Aronoff's article on language and linguistics on Scholarpedia (a peer-reviewed Wikipedia)
Glottopedia - a Wikipedia for linguists

Completely different stuff

My Erdős number is 4:


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