Ann Copestake

     Professor of Computational Linguistics
     Head of Department
     Department of Computer Science and Technology ("Computer Lab")
     University of Cambridge
     William Gates Building,
     15 JJ Thomson Avenue
     Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK
     PA: (+44) 
     work: (+44) 1223 334615, 
     fax: (+44) 1223 334678
     email: firstname.lastname @cl.cam.ac.uk

Research Group

Natural Language group home page (incl. local resources info.)

Cambridge Language Sciences

I am co-Director of Cambridge Language Sciences which is a (virtual) Interdisciplinary Research Centre.

Contacting me

Email is best: I hope everyone can work out my email from the information above. But you may find it more effective to contact my Personal Assistant for any Departmental or University business. Prospective students, interns and so on contacting me for the first time, please read this page about emailing me first.

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. I am generally interested in applications involving broad coverage text processing. Some details on ongoing work are available from the project web pages. See also current research directions.

Projects

See the list of projects for details of funded projects for which I have been PI at Cambridge (out-of-date). The larger projects have their own web pages. 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. Essentially a generalised or internationalised version of LinGO Linguistic Grammars Online. My main involvement is with the development of semantic representations (MRS/RMRS/DMRS) and in the LKB grammar development environment. We use DELPH-IN technology in all the funded projects.

Research students (with thesis title if completed)

Paula Czarnowska
Ewa Muszyńska
Alexander Kuhnle
Guy Emerson
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 Text representation in a language processing system
Advaith Siddharthan A text restructuring toolkit

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.

List of slides from presentations. This also contains links to material from courses at summer schools etc.

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.

CSLI studies in Computational Linguistics

I am series editor for CSLI Studies in Computational Linguistics. Please see my CSLI series page for a little more information.

FoLLI

I was president of FoLLI - The Association for Logic, Language and Information from 2012 to 2016: I am still on the FoLLI board.

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.

Ann Copestake
Created: February 2, 2001