Suzanne Stevenson


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Dept. of Computer Science

University of Toronto



Selected Publications

2007

  • P. Cook and S. Stevenson (2007). ``Automagically Inferring the Source Words of Lexical Blends'' Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics (PACLING 2007), 289-297. Melbourne, Australia, September, 2007. PDF file.

  • M. Jamieson, A. Fazly, S. Dickinson, S. Stevenson, and S. Wachsmuth (2007). "Learning structured appearance models from captioned images of cluttered scenes." Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 2007. PDF file.

  • A. Alishahi and S. Stevenson (2007). "A cognitive model for the representation and acquisition of verb selectional preferences." Proceedings of the ACL-2007 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition , 41-48. Prague, Czech Republic. PDF file.

  • P. Cook, A. Fazly, and S. Stevenson (2007). "Pulling their weight: exploiting syntactic forms for the automatic identification of idiomatic expressions in context." Proceedings of the ACL'07 Workshop on A Broader Perspective on Multiword Expressions, 41-48. Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007. PDF file.

  • A. Fazly and S. Stevenson (2007). "Distinguishing subtypes of multiword expressions using linguistically-motivated statistical measures." Proceedings of the ACL'07 Workshop on A Broader Perspective on Multiword Expressions, 9-16. Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007. PDF file.

  • A. Alishahi and S. Stevenson (2007). "A computational usage-based model for learning general properties of semantic roles." Proceedings of the 2nd European Cognitive Science Conference, Delphi, Greece. PDF file.

  • A. Fazly, S. Stevenson, and R. North (2007). "Automatically learning semantic knowledge about multiword predicates." Language Resources and Evaluation, 41(1). Publication information is available from Springer Journals, or contact the first author.

  • E. Joanis, S. Stevenson, and D. James (2007). ``A General Feature Space for Automatic Verb Classification.'' Natural Language Engineering. Forthcoming. Also published by Cambridge Journals Online on December 19, 2006, as this PDF file.

2006

  • P. Cook and S. Stevenson (2006). ``Classifying Particle Semantics in English Verb-Particle Constructions.'' Proceedings of the ACL/COLING Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Identifying and Exploiting Underlying Properties (MWE 2006), 45-53. Sydney, Australia, July, 2006.  PDF file.

  • M. Jamieson, S. Dickinson, S. Stevenson, and S. Wachsmuth (2006). ``Using Language to Drive the Perceptual Grouping of Local Image Features.'' Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR-2006), 2102-2109. New York, New York, June, 2006.  PDF file.

  • V. Tsang and S. Stevenson (2006). ``Context Comparison as a Minimum Cost Flow Problem.'' Proceedings of the HLT/NAACL Workshop on Graph-based Algorithms for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs 2006), 97-104. New York, New York, June, 2006.  PDF file.

  • A. Fazly and S. Stevenson (2006). ``Automatically Constructing a Lexicon of Verb Phrase Idiomatic Combinations.'' Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-2006), 337-344. Trento, Italy, April, 2006.  PDF file.

  • A. Fazly, R. North, and S. Stevenson (2006). ``Automatically Determining Allowable Combinations of a Class of Flexible Multiword Expressions.'' Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2006), 81-92. Mexico City, Mexico, February, 2006.  PDF file.
    Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3878 (2006) by Springer-Verlag; access Springer file here.

  • S. Stevenson and P. Smolensky (2006). ``Optimality in Sentence Processing.'' In P. Smolensky and G. Legendre, Eds., Toward a calculus of the mind/brain: Neural network theory, optimality, and universal grammar, 307-338. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  PDF file of draft chapter. (Note incorrect page numbering in draft.)

2005

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (2005). ``Structure and Frequency in Verb Classification.'' In L. Bruge, G. Giusti, N. Munaro, W. Schweikert, and G. Turano, Eds., Contributions to the Thirtieth ``Incontro di Grammatica Generativa'', 43-61. Venice, Italy, February 2004.  PDF file.

  • A. Fazly and S. Stevenson (2005). ``Automatic Acquisition of Knowledge about Multiword Predicates.'' Proceedings of the 19th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 2005). Invited Talk. Taipei, Taiwan, December, 2005.  PDF file.

  • R. Swier and S. Stevenson (2005). ``Exploiting a Verb Lexicon in Automatic Semantic Role Labelling.'' Proceedings of the Joint Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP-05), 883-890. Vancouver, British Columbia, October, 2005.  PDF file.

  • A. Alishahi and S. Stevenson (2005). ``The Acquisition and Use of Argument Structure Constructions: A Bayesian Model.'' Proceedings of the ACL 2005 Workshop on Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition, 82-90. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, June, 2005.  PDF file.

  • A. Fazly, R. North, and S. Stevenson (2005). ``Automatically Distinguishing Literal and Figurative Usages of Highly Polysemous Verbs.'' Proceedings of the ACL 2005 Workshop on Deep Lexical Acquisition, 38-47. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, June, 2005.  PDF file.

  • A. Alishahi and S. Stevenson (2005). ``A Probabilistic Model of Early Argument Structure Acquisition.'' Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2005), 97-102. Stresa, Italy, July, 2005.  PDF file.

2004

  • R. Swier and S. Stevenson (2004). ``Unsupervised Semantic Role Labelling.'' Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-04), 95-102. Barcelona, Spain, August, 2004.  PS file.

  • 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.

  • V. Tsang and S. Stevenson (2004). ``Calculating Semantic Distance between Word Sense Probability Distributions.'' Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2004), 81-88. Boston, Massachusetts, May, 2004.  PS file.

2003

  • S. Wachsmuth, S. Stevenson and S. Dickinson (2003). ``Towards A Framework For Learning Structured Shape Models from Text-Annotated Images.'' Proceedings of the Workshop on Learning Word Meaning from Non-Linguistic Data, 22-29. Edmonton, Alberta, May, 2003.  PS file.

  • S. Stevenson and E. Joanis (2003). ``Semi-Supervised Verb Class Discovery Using Noisy Features.'' Proceedings of the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2003), 71-78. Edmonton, Alberta, May-June, 2003.  PS file.

  • E. Joanis and S. Stevenson (2003). ``A General Feature Space for Automatic Verb Classification.'' Proceedings of the Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-2003), 163-170. Budapest, Hungary, April, 2003.  PS file.

2002

  • P. Merlo, S. Stevenson, V. Tsang and G. Allaria (2002). ``A Multilingual Paradigm for Automatic Verb Classification.'' Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2002), 207-214. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July, 2002.  PS file.

  • V. Tsang, S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (2002). ``Crosslinguistic Transfer in Automatic Verb Classification.'' Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-2002), 1023-1029. Taipei, Taiwan, August, 2002.  PS file.

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson, Eds. (2002). The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing: Formal, Computational and Experimental Issues. (Selected papers from the 11th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.) Natural Language Processing (NLP) Series, John Benjamins Publishers, Amsterdam.  Publisher's web page for the book.

  • S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (2002). ``Words, numbers and all that: the lexicon in sentence understanding.'' In P. Merlo and S. Stevenson, Eds., The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing: Formal, Computational and Experimental Issues, 1-38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (Introduction to edited volume; critical survey of the field.)  PS file.

  • E. Joanis, Automatic Verb Classification Using a General Feature Space. M.Sc. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, October 2002.  PDF file.

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (2002). ``Structure and Frequency of Lexical Semantic Classes: Consequences for Learning.'' Workshop on Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics (QITL). Osnabrueck, Germany, October, 2002.

2001

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (2001). ``Automatic Verb Classification Based on Statistical Distributions of Argument Structure.'' Computational Linguistics. 27: 3, 373-408.  PDF file.

  • V. Tsang and S. Stevenson (2001). ``Automatic Verb Classification Using Multilingual Resources.'' Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2001), 30-37. Toulouse, France, July, 2001.  PS file.

  • V. Tsang, Second Language Information Transfer in Automatic Verb Classification - A Preliminary Investigation. M.Sc. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, September 2001.  PDF file.

2000

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (2000). ``Lexical Syntax and Parsing Architecture.'' In M. Crocker, M. Pickering and C. Clifton, Eds., Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, 161-188. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Presents a higher level discussion of the work in the S. Stevenson and P. Merlo journal article in Language and Cognitive Processes.)  PS file.

  • S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (2000). ``Automatic Lexical Acquisition Based on Statistical Distributions.'' Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2000), 815-821. Saarbruecken, Germany, August, 2000.  PS file.

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (2000). ``Establishing the Upper Bound and Inter-Judge Agreement of a Verb Classification Task.'' Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2000), 1659-1663 (volume 3). Athens, Greece, May, 2000.

1999

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (1999). ``Language Acquisition and Ambiguity Resolution: The Role of Frequency Distributions.'' Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 399-404. Vancouver, Canada, August, 1999.  PS file.

  • S. Stevenson, P. Merlo, N. Kariaeva, and K. Whitehouse (1999). ``Supervised Learning of Lexical Semantic Verb Classes Using Frequency Distributions.'' Proceedings of SigLex99: Standardizing Lexical Resources, 15-22. College Park, Maryland, June, 1999.  PS file.

  • S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (1999). ``Automatic Verb Classification Using Distributions of Grammatical Features.'' Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 45-52. Bergen, Norway, June, 1999.  PS file.

  • S. Stevenson (1999). ``Bridging the Symbolic-Connectionist Gap in Language Comprehension.'' In E. Lepore, Ed., What is Cognitive Science?, 336-355. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.

1998

  • S. Stevenson (1998). ``Parsing as Incremental Restructuring.'' In J. D. Fodor and F. Ferreira, Eds., Reanalysis in Sentence Processing, 327-363. Boston: Kluwer Academic.  PS file.

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (1998). ``What Grammars Tell Us About Corpora: The Case of Reduced Relative Clauses.'' Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Very Large Corpora, 134-142. Montreal, Canada, August, 1998.  PS file.

  • S. Dickinson, A. Pentland, and S. Stevenson (1998). ``Viewpoint-Invariant Indexing for Content-Based Image Retrieval.'' Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Content-based Access of Image and Video Databases, 20-30. Bombay, India, January, 1998.

  • J. K. Tsotsos, G. Verghese, S. Dickinson, M. Jenkin, A. Jepson, E. Milios, F. Nuflo, S. Stevenson, M. Black, D. Metaxas, S. Culhane, Y. Ye, and R. Mann (1998). ``PLAYBOT: A visually-guided robot to assist physically disabled children in play.'' Image & Vision Computing 16, 275-292.

1997

  • S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (1997). ``Lexical Structure and Parsing Complexity.'' Language and Cognitive Processes 12: 2/3, 349-399. Reprinted in M. C. MacDonald, Ed., Lexical Representations and Sentence Processing, 349-399. East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press.

  • S. Stevenson (1997). ``An Integrated Symbolic/Connectionist Parsing Architecture.'' In R. Sun and F. Alexandre, Eds., Connectionist-Symbolic Integration: From Unified to Hybrid Approaches, 209-226. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

  • S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (1997). ``Architecture and Experience in Sentence Processing.'' Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 715-720. Stanford, California, August, 1997.

  • S. Stevenson and P. Smolensky (1997). ``Optimal Sentence Processing.'' Conference on Computational Psycholinguistics (CPL '97). Berkeley, California, August, 1997. (Refereed short paper; no conference proceedings.)

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (1997). ``The Role of Lexical Structure in Syntactic Processing.'' Conference on Computational Psycholinguistics (CPL '97). Berkeley, California, August, 1997. (Refereed short paper; no conference proceedings.)

1996

  • C. Kulikowski, R. Mezrich, L. Gong, S. Abad-Mota, S. Stevenson, A. Tria, and K. Klein (1996). ``Iconic Reporting of Radiological Findings: A New Visual Summarization and Communication Method.'' Proceeding of the Symposium for Computer Assisted Radiology (SCAR), 310-315. Boulder, Colorado, June, 1996.

1995

  • S. Stevenson (1995). ``An Integrated Symbolic/Connectionist Model of Natural Language Parsing.'' Working Notes of the IJCAI Workshop on Connectionist-Symbolic Integration, 50-55. Montreal, Canada, August, 1995. Revised paper in R. Sun and F. Alexandre, Eds., Connectionist-Symbolic Integration: From Unified to Hybrid Approaches; see above.

  • S. Stevenson (1995). ``Arguments and Adjuncts: A Computational Explanation of Asymmetries in Attachment Preferences.'' Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 748-753. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July, 1995.

  • J. K. Tsotsos, S. Dickinson, M. Jenkin, E. Milios, A. Jepson, B. Down, E. Amdur, S. Stevenson, M. Black, D. Metaxas, J. Cooperstock, S. Culhane, F. Nuflo, G. Verghese, W. Wai, D. Wilkes, and Y. Ye. (1995). ``The PLAYBOT Project.'' Working Notes of the IJCAI Workshop on AI Applications for Disabled People. Montreal, Quebec, August, 1995.

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (1995). ``The Role of Structural Complexity in Processing Reduced Relative Constructions.'' Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP-95). Edinburgh, Scotland, December, 1995. Full paper in M. Crocker, M. Pickering and C. Clifton, Eds., Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing; see above.

1994

  • S. Stevenson (1994). ``Competition and Recency in a Hybrid Network Model of Syntactic Disambiguation'' Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 23: 4, 295-322.

  • S. Stevenson (1994). ``A Unified Model of Preference and Recovery Mechanisms in Human Parsing.'' Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 824-829. Atlanta, Georgia, August, 1994.

1993

  • S. Stevenson (1993). ``A Competition-Based Explanation of Syntactic Attachment Preferences and Garden Path Phenomena.'' Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 266-273. Columbus, Ohio, June, 1993.

  • S. Stevenson (1993). ``Establishing Long-Distance Dependencies in a Hybrid Network Model of Human Parsing.'' Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 982-987. Boulder, Colorado, June, 1993.

  • S. Dickinson, S. Stevenson, E. Amdur, J. Tsotsos, and L. Olsson (1993). ``Integrating Task-Directed Planning with Reactive Object Recognition.'' Proceedings of SPIE Intelligent Robotics and Computer Vision XII, 212-224. Boston, Massachusetts, September, 1993.

1991

  • S. Stevenson and P. Coopmans (1991). ``How Extraction from Finite and Infinitival Complements: A Surprising Asymmetry.'' Linguistic Inquiry, 22:2, 359-367.

1990

  • S. Stevenson (1990). ``A Parallel Constraint Satisfaction and Spreading Activation Model for Resolving Syntactic Ambiguity.'' Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Lawrence Erlbaum, 396-403. Boston, Massachusetts, August, 1990.


Conference talks

For those further interested in my cognitive modeling work, these are some talks at the CUNY and AMLaP conferences on human language acquisition and processing:
  • S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (2001). ``Indicator-Based Learning of Argument Structure: Computational Experiments.'' Abstract in Proceedings of the 14th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March, 2001.

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (2001). ``Unsupervised Learning of Verb Classes from Lexical Statistics.'' Abstract in Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing. Saarbruecken, Germany, September, 2001.

  • P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (1999). ``Lexical Frequencies in Acquisition and Processing: A Computational Learning Approach.'' Abstract in Proceedings of the Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP-99). Edinburgh, Scotland, September, 1999.

  • S. Stevenson (1997). ``Competition in Sentence Processing: Computational Modeling and Behavioral Consequences.'' Abstract in Proceedings of the Tenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Santa Monica, California, March, 1997.

  • S. Stevenson (1995). ``Reconciling Constraint-Based and Structure-Based Explanations of Syntactic Preferences.'' Abstract in Proceedings of the Eighth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Tucson, Arizona, March, 1995.