My main research areas are Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. I am interested in 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 movie is one I would recommend to a friend, and this in different languages.

I am a Senior Research Investigator 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 of the Department of Informatics at the Athens University of Economics and Business.

News

• I co-organize Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO) 2022, the third Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures with Ivan Vuliç and Eneko Agirre, at ACL 2022.
  
• I gave a talk at the Columbia University NLP Seminar in New York City on November, 2.
  
• I gave a talk at the NYU NLP and Text-as-Data speaker series on November, 4, New York.
  
• Senior Action Editor for Lexical Semantics at ACL Rolling Review (ARR). Senior Area Chair for Lexical Semantics at EACL 2021. Area Chair for Lexical Semantics at *SEM 2022, EMNLP 2021, ACL-IJCNLP 2021, ACL 2020, EMNLP 2020, ACL 2019, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, for Multilinguality at *SEM 2019. Program Chair at *SEM 2020. Area Chair for the EMNLP 2022 theme track “Open questions, major obstacles, and unresolved issues in NLP".
  
• 2016-2021: PI of the MULTISEM: Advanced models for multilingual semantic processing
  project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) Young Researcher Program (JCJC).
• Member of the SIGLEX (ACL Special Interest Group on the Lexicon) Advisory Board (2016—).
  
  
  Contact: marapi at seas dot upenn dot edu