Rooth, Mats

Professor & Director, Comp. Li
I do research in two areas, computational linguistics and natural language semantics. I have worked extensively on mixed symbolic/probabilistic models of syntax and the lexicon, and am particularly interested in putting linguistic theories into contact with large samples of written and spoken language by means of efficient algorithms and numerical modeling. Currently, I am working on probabilistic parse forest algorithms which detect isolated linguistic events, such as one word being the head of an argument of another word. In semantics, I have worked on contrastive intonation (what is called focus), and on related phenomena such as ellipsis and presupposition.

Graduate Fields Represented: Linguistics

research

research and scholarship focus

Computational linguistics

semantics

research areas

affiliations

faculty appointment in

member of graduate field

background

educational background

  • PhD, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985

publications

selected publications (listing in progress)

Rooth, M. & Schmid, H. (2001). Parse forest computation of expected governors. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Rooth, M. (1999). Association with focus or association with presupposition? In P. Bosch and R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus, Cambridge Cambridge University Press.

Rooth, M., Riezler, S., Prescher, D., Carroll, G., & Beil, F. (1999). Inducing a semantically annotated lexicon via EM-based clustering. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Rooth, M., Beil, F., Carroll, G., Prescher, D. & Riezler, S. (1999). Inside-outside estimation of a lexicalized PCFG for German. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Rooth, M. & Carroll, G. (1998). Valence induction with a head-lexicalized PCFG. Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

Rooth, M. (1996). On the interface principles for intonational focus. Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory.

Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1 (1).