Professor of Distinction
Linguistics

Education

Ph.D., Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh, 1985
M.A., Computer Science, University of Texas, 1976
B.A., Philosophy, University of Texas, 1972

Regional and Thematic Interests

East Asia
Language

Profile

Martha Palmer is a Professor in the Linguistics Department and the Computer Science Department of the University of Colorado at Boulder, as well as a Faculty Fellow of Institute of Cognitive Science. She was formerly an Associate Professor in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been actively involved in research in Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation for over twenty years, beginning with her graduate work at the University of Edinburgh on the use of Lexical Conceptual Structures as predicate argument structures for driving the semantic interpretation process which formed the basis of the successful DARPA-funded text processing system, Pundit, built at Unisys during the 80's. This system integrated semantic and pragmatic processing in innovative ways that enabled sophisticated reference resolution and temporal analysis, and led to insights on the use of computational semantics that have continued to inform her research. She helped instigate the multilingual sense tagging evaluation exercises known as SENSEVAL, and supplied the data for the CoNLL shared task on Semantic Role Labeling for 2004 and 2005. Current research is aimed at building domain-independent and language independent techniques for semantic interpretation based on linguistically annotated data used for training supervised systems, such as Proposition Banks. She has been the PI on projects to build Chinese, Korean and Hindi TreeBanks and English, Chinese, Korean, Arabic and Hindi Proposition Banks. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee for the DARPA TIDES program, Chair of SIGLEX, Chair of SIGHAN, and is a past President of the Association for Computational Linguistics.