Lucas Champollion
Welcome to my homepage.
I'm a 4th year Ph.D. student
at the Department of Linguistics at
the University of Pennsylvania. I
received a Master of Science in Engineering from Penn's Department of Computer and Information
Science in 2007.
I'm a student of
computational
linguistics, focusing on
computational
semantics. What this means is I'm trying (with many other people) to teach computers how to read, and how to figure out what it means that they read. It might take the field some time to figure out how to do
this. So in the meantime, to keep myself busy, I read and
write by myself (and with other people on occasion). Some of my papers and computer programs are
listed
below.
My address:
Lucas Champollion
Department of Linguistics
619 Williams Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
USA
This is only a postal address, not an office.
Email:

My CV:
PDF
Research Interests:
Formal semantics of natural language, formal properties of
Tree-adjoining Grammar (TAG) and its variants,
underspecfied semantics,
dependency parsing,
game theoretic semantics
Journal papers:
-
Shen, Libin, Lucas Champollion, and Aravind K. Joshi (2008). LTAG-spinal
and the Treebank: A new resource for incremental, dependency and semantic
parsing. Language Resources and Evaluation, 42(1):1-19. Online at
SpringerLink. Pre-print version: PDF. See also the website to this paper.
Conference presentations:
-
Champollion, Lucas (2008).
Binding theory in LTAG.
Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar
and related formalisms (TAG+9), Tuebingen, Germany.
PDF
-
Champollion, Lucas (2008).
The influence of goals on ambiguities in certain donkey sentences.
Presentation at the Fourth Formal Semantics in Moscow workshop (FSIM 4),
April 5-6, 2008.
Handout (PDF)
-
Champollion, Lucas, Joshua Tauberer, and Maribel Romero (2007). "The Penn Lambda
Calculator: Pedagogical Software for Natural Language Semantics", in
T. Holloway King and E. M. Bender (eds.), Proceedings of the Grammar
Engineering across Frameworks (GEAF) 2007 Workshop. Stanford, CA, July
13-15 2007. CSLI On-line Publications.
[PDF]
See also the homepage of the
software application described in this paper.
-
Champollion, Lucas (2007). Lexicalized non-local MCTAG with dominance
links is NP-complete. Proceedings of Mathematics of Language 10,
UCLA. Ed. by Gerald Penn and Ed Stabler. CSLI On-Line Publications.
PDF
Handout from the MOL talk with sample
derivation. PDF
- Champollion, Lucas,
Prashanth Mannem, and Livio Robaldo (2007).
Bidirectional dependency parsing trained on the Turin University
Treebank. Proceedings of the EVALITA 2007 Workshop. Rome, Italy, September
10th, 2007. Special issue of
Intelligenza Artifiziale, volume IV(2), pages 48-49. PDF
- Champollion, Lucas
(2006). On the (ir)relevance of psycholinguistics for anaphora
resolution. Workshop on ambiguity in anaphora, ESSLLI 2006,
Málaga, Spain. PDF
Manuscripts:
- Champollion,
Lucas, and Maya Ravindranath (2006). The formal semantics of positive
and negative anymore.
Manuscript. (Please email me for this paper.)
- Champollion, Lucas
(2006). A game-theoretic account of adjective ordering restrictions.
Manuscript. PDF
Teaching:
Software:
-
The Penn Lambda
Calculator is an interactive, graphical,
pedagogical computer program that helps students of formal semantics
practice the typed lambda calculus. (Joint work with Josh Tauberer and Maribel Romero. Much more
information can be found on the application's web site or in the paper
listed above as Champollion, Tauberer and Romero 2007.)
-
Java API for the
LTAG-spinal treebank.
Follow the link for download information or browse Javadoc
online.
- tblplus.zip: a transformation-based system that
learns historical spelling changes. Note:
The version that can be downloaded here isn't functional
unless fntbl is
installed on the same computer and some paths in the scripts are
adapted.
This
project grew out of the necessity to produce an automatic morphological
analysis
for Middle French, with the ultimate goal of contributing to the
production of a Middle French Treebank (by Tony Kroch).
Since morphological analyzers are readily available for Modern French,
I used transformation-based learning to convert the spelling of Middle
French texts to make them look as similar to Modern French as possible
with respect to morphology.
The tool is installed on
alpha.nlp.liniac.upenn.edu in the
directory /home/champoll/tblplus.
Check out the README file for a more
detailed description of the project.
Selected linguistics links
Mark Aronoff's
article on language on Scholarpedia (a peer-reviewed Wikipedia)
Glottopedia - a Wikipedia for linguists
Completely different stuff
My Erdős
number is 4:
- Aronov, B.; Erdős, P.; Goddard, W.; Kleitman, D. J.; Klugerman, M.; Pach, J.; Schulman, L. J. Crossing families. Combinatorica 14 (1994), no. 2, 127--134.
- Agarwal, Pankaj K.; Aggarwal, Alok; Aronov, B.; Kosaraju, S. Rao; Schieber, Baruch; Suri, Subhash Computing external farthest neighbors for a simple polygon. First Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (Montreal, PQ, 1989). Discrete Appl. Math. 31 (1991), no. 2, 97--111.
- Joshi, A. K.; Kosaraju, S. R.; Yamada, H. M. String adjunct grammars. I. Local and distributed adjunction. Information and Control 21 (1972), 93--116.
- Shen, L.; Champollion, L.; Joshi, A.K. LTAG-spinal and the Treebank: A new resource for incremental, dependency and semantic
parsing. Language Resources and Evaluation, 42 (2008), no. 1, 1--19.
Tension
by Billy Collins: A poem I like
Progress tracker for a bill that would allow Penn grad students to
unionize:
SUBTLE
wiki