I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego.
AP&M Room 4220
Phone: (858) 534-7219 Department of Linguistics, UCSD Fax: (858) 534-4789 9500 Gilman Drive #108 Email: rlevy@ucsd.edu La Jolla, CA 92093-0108, USA
My research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing of natural language. Inherently, linguistic communication involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. How can a fixed set of knowledge and resources be deployed to manage this uncertainty? To address these questions I use a combination of computational modelling and psycholinguistic experimentation. This work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing, and helps us design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language.
In Winter 2008 I teach Statistical Natural Language Processing (Linguistics/CSE 256) at UCSD. If you're a graduate student interested in language and computation, come check it out!
Roger Levy. 2005. Probabilistic models of word order and syntactic discontinuity. Stanford University. [PS|PDF]
Gabriel Doyle and Roger Levy. 2008. Environment Prototypicality in Syntactic Alternation. To appear in Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. [PDF]
Nathaniel Smith and Roger Levy. 2008. Optimal Processing Times in Reading: a Formal Model and Empirical Investigation. To appear in Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (oral presentation). [PDF]
Roger Levy. 2008. Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106(3):1126-1177. [PDF]
Roger Levy and T. Florian Jaeger. 2006. Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. [paper|appendix 1|appendix 2]
Sarah Bunin Benor and Roger Levy. 2006. The Chicken or the Egg? A Probabilistic Analysis of English Binomials. Language 82(2):233-278. Pre-proof version: [PDF] An alphabetical list of the binomials and their semantic constraint violation profiles: [ASCII]
Roger Levy and Galen Andrew. 2006. Tregex and Tsurgeon: tools for querying and manipulating tree data structures. Proceedings of LREC 2006. [PDF]
Roger Levy and Christopher Manning. 2004. Deep dependencies from context-free statistical parsers: correcting the surface dependency approximation. Proceedings of ACL 2004. [PDF|PS].
Iddo Lev, Bill MacCartney, Christopher Manning, and Roger Levy. 2004. Solving Logic Puzzles: From Robust Processing to Precise Semantics. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation. [PDF]
Roger Levy and David Oshima. 2003. Non-transitive information flow in Japanese noun-classifier matching. Proceedings of HPSG 2003. [PDF]
Roger Levy and Christopher Manning. 2003. Is it harder to parse Chinese, or the Chinese Treebank? Published in Proceedings of ACL 2003. [PS]
Cynthia Thompson, Roger Levy, and Christopher Manning. 2003. A Generative Model for FrameNet Semantic Role Labeling. Proceedings of ECML 2003. [PDF]
Roger Levy and Carl Pollard. 2001. Coordination and Neutralization in HPSG. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. [PDF]
Roger Levy. Draft of March 19, 2001. Feature Indeterminacy and the Coordination of Unlikes in a Totally Well-Typed HPSG. [PDF|PS]
Roger Levy. 2008. A fully rational model of local-coherence effects: modeling uncertainty about the linguistic input in sentence comprehension. Oral presentation given at the 2008 CUNY sentence processing conference. [PPT | PDF]
Nathaniel Smith and Roger Levy. 2008. Surprisal as optimal behavior: a formal model and empirical investigation. Oral presentation given at the 2008 CUNY sentence processing conference. [PDF]
Hannah Rohde, Roger Levy, and Andrew Kehler. 2008. Implicit Causality Biases Influence Relative Clause Attachment Poster presentation given at the 2008 CUNY sentence processing conference. [PDF]
Roger Levy, Edward Gibson, and Evelina Fedorenko. 2008. Expectation-based processing of extraposed structures in English. Poster presentation given at the 2008 CUNY sentence processing conference. [PDF]
Roger Levy and Frank Keller. Expectation and Memory in Processing of German Verb-final Clauses: Relativization Matters. Poster presentation given at the 2008 CUNY sentence processing conference. [PDF]
Klinton Bicknell, Vera Demberg, and Roger Levy. 2008. Local coherences in the wild: An eye-tracking corpus study. Poster presentation given at the 2008 CUNY sentence processing conference. [PDF]
Hannah Rohde, Roger Levy, and Andy Kehler. 2008. Coherence-Driven Effects in Relative Clause Processing. Oral presentation at the 2008 meeting of the LSA, January 2008. [PPT]
Gabriel Doyle and Roger Levy. 2008. Mixed categories and gradient grammatical constraints. Poster presentation at the 2008 meeting of the LSA, January 2008. [PDF]
Roger Levy, Evelina Fedorenko, and Edward Gibson. 2007. The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses. Oral presentation at CUNY sentence processing conference, March 2007. [PDF] Also, a poster presented at AMLaP 2006: [PDF]
Vera Demberg, Frank Keller, and Roger Levy. 2007. Eye-tracking Evidence for Frequency and Integration Cost Effects in Corpus Data.. Oral presentation at CUNY sentence processing conference, March 2007. [PDF]
Roger Levy and Frank Keller. 2007. Sentence Position and Time-course in Expectation-based Processing of Final Verbs. Poster presentation at CUNY sentence processing conference, March 2007. [PDF]
Evelina Fedorenko and Roger Levy. 2007. Information structure and word order in Russian sentence comprehension. Poster presented at CUNY sentence processing conference, March 2007, and at AMLaP 2006. [PDF]
Roger Levy. 2005. German word order and expectation-based syntactic processing. Poster presented at the 2005 CUNY Sentence Processing conference. [PDF]
Roger Levy. 2005. Processing difficulty in verb-final clauses matches syntactic expectations. Presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. [PS|PDF]
Roger Levy. 2004. The statistical properties of coordinate noun phrases. Presented at the Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado-Boulder, March 11, 2004. [PDF|PS]
Roger Levy. 2002. The Statistical Distribution of English Coordinate Noun Phrases: Parallelism and Weight Effects (Handout from NWAV 31, October 2002) [PDF|PS] (This handout is superseded by the 2004 "statistical properties of coordinate noun phrases" handout above.)
Roger Levy. 2002. Non-events and the aspect of locative keep (Handout from Stanford Semantics Fest, March 15, 2002) [PS]
Coming up Winter 2008:
Fall 2007: Linguistics 251, Probabilistic Methods in Linguistics
Summer 2007: LSA Summer Institute: Computational Psycholinguistics
Spring 2007: Linguistics 274, Computational Psycholinguistics
Fall 2006:
Summer 2006: Probabilistic Methods in Computational Psycholinguistics
You can download my prefix probability parser.
Galen Andrew and I have developed the tregex tree pattern matcher in Java. Its functionality is essentially a superset of tgrep2, plus it works cross-platform out of the box.
I wrote the Tsurgeon tree-transformation utility, which is built on top of tregex.
A barebones implementation of the Spivey-Knowlton (1996) competition-integration model can be found here.
I also designed the Chinese and German grammars of the publicly available Stanford Parser.
My CV.
My blog -- lots of technical tidbits, some linguistics, and a bit of politics.
Here are some links I've found useful lately. Maybe you might find one or two of them useful, too.
Here are a few things about me.
Last modified: December 2007