Research Interests:
Broadly, I'm interested in light verb constructions and large corpora, such as the web. Light verb constructions (with examples such as take a walk, make a trip, and give a smile) are, briefly, a class of multiword expressions consisting of a semantically-bleached light verb (take. make, and give, in the above examples), combined with a heavy verbal noun (walk, trip, smile). Specific work has been done on capturing computationally the validity of a given light verb construction, given various levels and types of input data, gathered from targeted queries to search engines.

Personal Information:
I was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to the 1980 versions of Anna and Randy North, who I'm told were quite pleased! I have a brother, Victor, born two years after me. I graduated from Carleton University with an Honours degree in Computer Science and a minor in Film Studies, before coming to the University of Toronto for graduate studies in Computational Linguistics. In my spare time, I write these comics on the internet and in print about talking dinosaurs.

Publications:
S. Stevenson, A. Fazly, and R. North (2004). ``Statistical Measures of the Semi-Productivity of Light Verb Constructions.'' Proceedings of the ACL 2004 Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing, 1-8. Barcelona, Spain, August, 2004.  PS file.

``Computational Measures of the Acceptability of Light Verb Constructions.'' MSc thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 2005. PDF file. PS file.

Contact Information:
Via the post:
Ryan North
Department of Computer Science
10 King's College Road
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON
CANADA M5S 3G4

Via the internet:
ryan cs toronto edu (add @ . .)