Cassandre Creswell: Research and Publications


Research Interests:
Non-truth conditional meaning, in particular the characterization of the discourse functions of particular syntactic and prosodic forms based on large corpora of naturally-occurring data. This spans the subfields of pragmatics, syntax, semantics, phonetics, and computational linguistics. Currently, my work focuses on the relationship of non-canonical syntax in English with information structure, discourse structure, and attentional structure.

Dissertation:
Syntactic form and discourse function in natural language generation.
Advisors: Ellen Prince and Aravind Joshi
Previous research has shown that certain discourse conditions are necessary for the felicitous use of special syntactic forms like topicalization, left-dislocation, and clefts. If we try to model the generation of these statistically-rare forms computationally based only on these necessary conditions, it will result in overgeneration. The goal of this project is a model of syntactic choice characterizing the sufficient conditions behind syntactic choice, in other words to explain why and when speakers generate the syntactic forms they do.

Papers:
The predicate-argument structure of discourse connectives: A corpus-based study. With Eleni Miltsakaki, Katherine Forbes, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber. Anaphora Processing. Antonio Branco, Tony McEnery, and Ruslan Mitkov. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2004.

Using a probabilistic model of discourse relations to investigate word order variation. Proceedings of the Discourse Annotation Workshop. ACL '04, Barcelona. July 2004.

The importance of discourse context for statistical natural language generation. With Elsi Kaiser.5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue April 2004.

Anaphoric arguments of discourse connectives. With Eleni Miltsakaki, Katherine Forbes, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber. EACL 2003 Workshop on the Computational Treatment of Anaphora. April 2003.

The discourse anaphoric properties of connectives. With Katherine Forbes, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber. 4th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium. September 2002.

Syntactic form and discourse function in NLG. Proceedings of Second International Natural Language Generation Conference (Student Session). July 2002.

Resumptive pronouns, wh-islands, and sentence production. Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars. May 2002.

English dependency treebank coding manual. With Owen Rambow. (Described in Owen Rambow, Cassandre Creswell, Rachel Szekely, Harriet Taber, and Marilyn Walker. A Dependency Treebank for English. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. May 2002.)

The use of emphatic reflexives with NPs in English. 2002. Information Sharing. Chapter 5. Kees van Deemter and Roger Kibble, eds. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. (first presented at Workshop on the Generation of Nominal Expressions, European Summer School on Logic Language and Information, August 1999.)

Passive and passive-like constructions in Hmong. With Kieran Snyder. Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics XIX. February 2000.

The discourse function of verum focus in wh-questions. Proceedings of North East Linguistics Society 30. October 1999.

Is that a real question?: Final rises, final falls and discourse function in yes-no question intonation.  With Atissa Banuazizi. Papers from the 35th Regional Meeting. Chicago Linguistic Society. 1999.

Non-argument reflexives: a pragmatic analysis. Relevance Theory Workshop in conjunction with the Linguistics Society of Great Britain's Annual Fall meeting. September 1998.

Criticizing with a Question. 1993 (publ. Oct. 1996.) Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 23 (2), 25-32.

Conditional Imperfection: a pilot study on the prosodic form and discourse function of if-clauses. Ms. Do not quote without permission. 2000.