My main research area is Computational Semantics, a subfield of Computational Linguistics with applications in Natural Language Processing. Computational semantics research aims at analysing the meaning of natural language, designing meaning representations, and developing mechanisms for reasoning over them.
I am interested in both theoretical and application-oriented aspects of natural language semantics, and in cognitive aspects of language learning.
In my research, I want to help computers understand the meaning of words and utterances, and perform operations that we, humans, perform with language such as logical inference and translation.
I want to help them recognize that one cannot run and sleep at the same time; that cats are pets but so can be iguanas (although less typical ones); that a great book is one I would recommend to a friend, and this in different languages.
I am Senior Researcher in the
Department of Computer and Information Science (CIS) of the
School of Engineering and Applied Science at the
University of Pennsylvania, and member of the
UPenn NLP group. I am currently on leave from the French
CNRS where I hold a tenure researcher position.
I am also associated with the
NLP group at the Department of Informatics in the Athens University of Economics and Business.
News
- My survey paper From Word Types to Tokens and Back: A Survey of Approaches to Word Meaning Representation and Interpretation appeared in Computational Linguistics, Vol. 49(2).
- I defended my Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) on Word Meaning Representation and Interpretation in Vector Space at the University Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier on Nov, 9, 2022.
- Oct 2022: Elected Vice-President of SIGLEX (ACL Special Interest Group on the Lexicon).
- Senior Action Editor (SAE) for Lexical Semantics at ACL Rolling Review (ARR). Senior Area Chair (SAC) for Lexical Semantics at ACL 2023, LREC-COLING 2024 and EACL 2021. SAC for Semantics at EMNLP 2023. Area Chair (AC) for Lexical Semantics at *SEM 2022, EMNLP 2021, ACL-IJCNLP 2021, ACL 2020, EMNLP 2020, ACL 2019, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019; AC for the EMNLP 2022 theme track “Open questions, major obstacles, and unresolved issues in NLP"; AC for Multilinguality at *SEM 2019. Program Chair at *SEM 2020.
- I co-organized the First, Second and Third Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO) Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures with Ivan Vuliç and Eneko Agirre at EMNLP 2020, NAACL-HLT 2021, and ACL 2022.
Contact: marapi at seas dot upenn dot edu