I am a 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 National Research Center (
CNRS) where I hold a tenure researcher position.
My research interests focus on computational linguistics and natural language processing, and specifically in the area of semantics with the goal of modeling the meaning of natural language. I am working on designing meaning representations and mechanisms for reasoning over them, and also on analyzing the semantic information encoded by large language models and devising ways to enhance and complement it. I am interested in both theoretical and application-oriented aspects of natural language semantics and commonsense reasoning, and in cognitive aspects of language learning.
News
- I am Program co-Chair for COLING 2025.
- With Abdellah Fourtassi and Sebastian Padó, we are co-editing the Special Issue of Computational Linguistics on Language Learning, Representation, and Processing in Humans and Machines.
- 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 "Semantics: Lexical, Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other Areas" at EMNLP 2024. SAC for Semantics at EMNLP 2023. SAC for Lexical Semantics at ACL 2023, LREC-COLING 2024 and EACL 2021. Area Chair (AC) for Lexical Semantics at NAACL 2024, *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 am one of the organizers of the SHROOM shared task on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes at SemEval 2024.
- 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