Mats Rooth
Professor, Director of Computational Linguistics Lab
(PhD, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985)
Department of Linguistics
203A Morrill Hall
mr249@cornell.edu 607 255-0716
Additional affiliation: Faculty of Computing and Information Science
Research
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, on contrastive intonation (what is called focus), and on related phenomena such as ellipsis and presupposition. In addition to these, I am currently working on finite state optimality theory and web harvesting of intonational data.
Selected Publications
Rooth, Mats (2010). Second occurrence focus and relativized stress F . In Fery, Caroline and Zimmermann, Malte (eds.) Information Stucture: Theoretical, Typological, and Experimental Perspectives. Oxford University Press. Preprint doi 1813/13092.
Deoskar, Tejaswini, Mats Rooth, and Khalil Sima'an (2009). Smoothing fine-grained PCFG lexicons. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of Parsing Technologies. (pdf)
Howell, Jonathan and Mats Rooth (2009). Web harvest of minimal intonational pairs. Web as Corpus 5, September 2009. doi 1813/13079.
Howell, Jonathan and Mats Rooth (2009). A corpus search methodology for focus realization. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 125, Issue 4, pp. 2573-2573. Abstract and poster at doi 1813/13093 .
Rooth, Mats (2008). Notions of Focus Anaphoricity. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, Vol. 55 (3-4), pp. 277-285 (2008). doi 10.1556/ALing.55.2008.3-4.3. (pdf)
Deoskar, Tejaswini and Mats Rooth (2008). Induction of Treebank-Aligned Lexical Resources. Proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Marrakech. Morocco. (pdf)
Recent and Upcoming Presentations
Harvesting speech datasets for linguistic research on the web. International Workshop on Corpus Linguistics and Endangered Dialects. NINJAL Tokyo, Oct. 11, 2012 (program).
A recursive phonology interface for WH-F Alternative semantics. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, July, 2012.
A recursive phonology interface for WH-F Alternative semantics. Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, July, 2012.
Digging into Data Plenary at ACSUS, sponsored by SSHRC, Nov.18, 2011.
A recursive phonology interface for WH-F Alternative semantics. University of Toronto, Oct. 14, 2011.
Continuation semantics in linguistics. Invited talk at ACM SIGPLAN Continuation Workshop 2011, Tokyo, Sept. 24 2011.
A recursive phonology interface for WH-F alternative semantics. Tokyo Semantics Research Group, NII, Sept. 22, 2011.
Keynote talk at the HPSG workshop on Information Structure in Formal Grammar (IFG 2011). Seattle, 23 August, 2011.
Invited commentary at Workshop on Textual Inference, LSA Summer Insitute, Boulder, July 9-10 2011.
Harvesting Speech Datasets for Linguistic Research on the Web. Digging into Data Conference, NEH, Washington DC, June 9-10 2011. With Jonathan Howell and Michael Wagner.
A recursive phonology interface for WH-F Alternative semantics. SALT 21, Rutgers, May 20-22, 2011. With Hongyuan Dong. (slides)
Focus architecture. Cornell Workshop in Linguistics and Philosophy: Alternatives, Apr 30 - May 1, 2011.
A new/unified architecture for focus. Cornell is Gorges Linguistics Workshop April 15-16, 2011.
Acoustic classification of focus in a web corpus of comparatives. Workshop on new tools and methods for very-large-scale phonetics research, University of Pennsylvania. With Jonathan Howell and Michael Wagner. Jan. 2011.
Current Issues in the Theory of Focus. Mini-course, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, January 2011.
Localizing the phonology interface for alternative semantics. Phonology Colloquium, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jan. 2011.