I am a Principal Research Scientist for the
Natural Language and Artificial Intelligence group at Nuance Communications. You can read more about my work on the Nuance Research website.

I have a PhD in linguistics with a concentration in cognitive science from Cornell University. My previous research focuses on the computational modeling of human language processing. It features interdisciplinary techniques from linguistics, computer science, and psychology.

You can reach me at: mfb74 at cornell dot edu

My academic CV is available in PDF form here, but really needs to be updated.

My LinkedIn profile includes up-to-date information about my professional experience.

You can also check the Downloads section below for the majority of my papers, software, and poster presentations.

Dissertation

Boston, Marisa Ferrara. 2012. A computational model of cognitive constraints in syntactic locality. Cornell University. [abstract]. [BibTex].

Papers

Boston, Marisa Ferrara, John T. Hale, Shravan Vasishth, and Reinhold Kliegl. 2011. Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty. Language and Cognitive Processes 26(3): 301-349. [BibTex].

Boston, Marisa Ferrara. 2010. The role of memory in superiority violation gradience. Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, ACL 2010. Pages 36-44. [BibTex].

Boston, Marisa Ferrara, John T. Hale, and Marco Kuhlmann. 2010. Dependency structures derived from Minimalist Grammars. In C. Ebert, G. Jäger, and J. Michaelis (Eds.): MOL 10/11, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6149, pp. 1–12. [BibTex].

Boston, Marisa Ferrara, John T. Hale, and Marco Kuhlmann. 2009. Dependency structures derived from Minimalist Grammars. In Proceedings of Mathematics of Language 11 [BibTex].

Boston, Marisa Ferrara, John T. Hale, Reinhold Kliegl, and Shravan Vasishth. 2008. Surprising parser actions and reading difficulty. In Proceedings of ACL-08:HLT, Short Papers. Pages 5-8. [BibTex].

Boston, Marisa Ferrara and Zhong Chen. 2008. Multilingual feature selection for a human sentence processing model. In Proceedings of the Fifth Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium (MCLC). [BibTex].

Boston, Marisa Ferrara, John T. Hale, Reinhold Kliegl, Umesh Patil, and Shravan Vasishth. 2008. Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. Journal of Eye Movement Research 2(1): 1-12.[BibTex].

Boston, Marisa Ferrara and John T. Hale. 2007. Garden-Pathing in a Statistical Dependency Parser. In Proceedings of the Fourth Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium (MCLC). [BibTex].

Software

HumDepLocality. A non-projective dependency parser informed by cognitive constraints. Current languages: English, Swedish, German, and Russian. Current psycholinguistic measures: Surprisal, Retrieval. See dissertation for details.

HumDep Version 3.0. (The parser formally known as DepParse). An incremental dependency parser developed for human sentence processing modeling. Current languages: English, German, Chinese, Dutch. Current psycholinguistic measures: Surprisal, Retrieval.

DepPrint Version 1.1. A dependency grammar visualizer that outputs SVG files.

NegraToConfig. A conversion tool from Negra format to Nivre parser configurations.

Poster Presentations

A processing model of the strong and weak island distinction. Poster from CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference in Palo Alto, CA. March 24-26, 2011.

Memory activation and interference model syntactic locality gradience differently. Poster from AMLaP 2010 in York, England. September 6-8, 2010.

Examining syntactic factors in eye fixation durations. Poster from CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference in Davis, California. March 26-28, 2009.

Surprising parser actions and reading difficulty. Poster from ACL 2008 in Columbus, Ohio. June 15-20, 2008.

Modeling garden paths in a statistical dependency parser: Chinese, German, and English. Poster from CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference 2008 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. March 13-15, 2008.

Garden-pathing in a statistical dependency parser. Poster from AMLaP 2007 in Turku, Finland. August 24-27, 2007.

This is what drives my research.
From xkcd.com