Visits of International Scientists

James Pustejovsky from Brandeis University (Boston, USA) was invited Professor at Alpage in April 2014. His stay was funded by Inria, his travel by Alpage. He is specialist in computational semantics and the creator of the “Generative Lexicon”. During his stay in Paris, he gave two lectures with a large audience. The topic was on the computational model of events. The notion of event has long been central for both modeling the semantics of natural language as well as reasoning in goal-driven tasks in artificial intelligence. James outlined a unified theory of event structure. James has also been working with Alpage members. First on the French lexical resources developed at Alpage, namely Framenet (Marie Candito) and Verbenet (Laurence Danlos). Second on the role of attributions in discourse structure within the linguistic work made at Alpage for the ANR Polymnie (Laurence Danlos and Julie Hunter).

Internships

Kristina Gulordava is a visiting research student from the University of Geneva (LATL) supervised by Paola Merlo, visting ALPAGE from September 2014 to January 2015. Her Phd thesis is dedicated to the study of generic cross linguistic constraints across languages. Her goal is to investigate the connection between the quantitative aspects of word order variation across languages and the quantitative aspects of word order variation within a language. She explores to which extent a computational corpus-based analysis can provide new evidence not only for empirical, but also for theoretical linguistic research.