Ann Copestake

     Professor of Computational Linguistics
     Department of Computer Science and Technology ("Computer Lab")
     University of Cambridge
     William Gates Building,
     15 JJ Thomson Avenue
     Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK
     email: firstname.lastname @cl.cam.ac.uk

Research Theme

Natural Language theme page

Contacting me

Email is best: I hope everyone can work out my email from the information above. But please note that I am on sabbatical and that I am not taking on students or interns. I have no vacancies for postdocs.

Research overview

My research is in Natural Language Processing (NLP) / Computational Linguistics (a branch of AI), mostly in formal representation issues, compositional and lexical semantics and natural language generation. I am also the original developer of the LKB system which is a freely available grammar and lexicon development environment for constraint-based frameworks including HPSG. I've worked on a variety of application areas including scientific text processing, information extraction, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), machine translation, Natural Language Interfaces, lexical acquisition and on tools for lexicographers.

Current Projects

I am one of the Co-PIs on Giving Voice to Digital Democracies

I am a member of the Advisory Group for The Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery

I have a long-term involvement in DELPH-IN. This is not a conventional funded project but a loosely structured consortium of researchers developing open source grammars and technology for linguistically-motivated NLP. My main involvement is with the development of semantic representations (MRS/RMRS/DMRS) and in the LKB grammar development environment.

See the list of projects for details of some past funded projects for which I have been PI at Cambridge. The larger projects have their own web pages.

PhD students

Huiyuan Xie Evaluating Natural Language Generation Tasks for Grammaticality, Faithfulness and Diversity
Paula Czarnowska Morphological Competence in Neural Natural Language Processing
Ewa Muszyńska Semantic Chunking
Alexander Kuhnle Evaluating visually grounded language capabilities using microworlds
Guy Emerson Functional Distributional Semantics: Learning Linguistically Informed Representations from a Precisely Annotated Corpus
Matic Horvat Hierarchical statistical semantic translation and realization
Theodosia Togia The language of collaborative tagging
Richard Bergmair Monte Carlo Semantics: Robust inference and logical pattern processing with Natural Language text
Aurelie Herbelot Underspecified quantification
Mohan Ganesalingam The language of mathematics
Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha Learning compound noun semantics
Eric Henderson A text representation language for contextual and distributional processing
Advaith Siddharthan Syntactic simplification and text cohesion

Publications

See my Google Scholar profile. I no longer actively maintain my publications list but keep it available for downloadable versions of older papers and reports.

LKB system links

Information about the LKB system
Web page for the `LKB book' Implementing typed feature structure grammars. The LKB system user manual is readable from this page.

Short Biography

After getting a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge (mostly Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry), I worked for Unilever Research for two years, and then did the Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge. I started doing research in Natural Language Processing/Computational Linguistics at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1985. I worked for ten years on a series of projects, including ACQUILEX. During that time I also did a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Sussex (1990-1992), was a visitor at Xerox PARC (1993/4) and worked on the Verbmobil project for the University of Stuttgart (1994/5). From July 1994 to October 2000 I was at CSLI, Stanford University, as a Senior Researcher. I became a University Lecturer at Cambridge in October 2000 and am now a Professor. I became Head of Department on May 1 2018 and finished my term on September 30 2023.

Ann Copestake
Created: February 2, 2001
Last updated: October 4, 2023