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Alexis Palmer


Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of Colorado Boulder

I am a computational linguist and a professor in the department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder. I grew up in rural northern Michigan, studied English literature at the University of Michigan, and later earn both an MA and a PhD in computational linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. After many years working in research and teaching positions in Germany (Saarbrücken, Stuttgart, and Heidelberg), I returned to the US and to US university culture. My main research interests are computational semantics, computational discourse, and the development and application of computational methods to support language documentation and revitalization. I’m also a musician and a cat lover!

Current research areas of interest.

Research Area 1

Researchers: Alexis Palmer, X, Y, Z



Link: LINK

Description of the research

Research Area 2

Researchers: Alexis Palmer, X, Y, Z



Link: LINK

Description of research2

Current research areas of interest.

Publications that I have been involved in.

  1. AmericasNLI: Evaluating Zero-shot Natural Language Understanding of Pretrained Multilingual Models in Truly Low-resource Languages
    Ebrahimi, Abteen, Mager, Manuel, Oncevay, Arturo, Chaudhary, Vishrav, Chiruzzo, Luis, Fan, Angela, Ortega, John, Ramos, Ricardo, Rios, Annette, Vladimir, Ivan, and others,
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.08726 2021
  2. An Experience Report for Running an REU Program in an iSchool
    Ding, Junhua, Chen, Jiangping, Palmer, Alexis, and Smith, Daniella
    In International Conference on Information 2020
  3. A summary of the first Workshop on Language Technology for Language Documentation and Revitalization
    Neubig, Graham, Rijhwani, Shruti, Palmer, Alexis, MacKenzie, Jordan, Cruz, Hilaria, Li, Xinjian, Lee, Matthew, Chaudhary, Aditi, Gessler, Luke, Abney, Steven, and others,
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.13203 2020
  4. Automatic evaluation of online learning interaction content using domain concepts
    Wu, Di, Wu, Lei, Palmer, Alexis, Zhou, Peng, and others,
    The Electronic Library 2020
  5. WikiPossessions: Possession timeline generation as an evaluation benchmark for machine reading comprehension of long texts
    Chinnappa, Dhivya, Palmer, Alexis, and Blanco, Eduardo
    In Proceedings of The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2020
  6. UNTLing at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Detection of propaganda techniques in news articles
    Petee, Maias, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, SemEval 2020
  7. Predicting the focus of negation: Model and error analysis
    Hossain, Md Mosharaf, Hamilton, Kathleen, Palmer, Alexis, and Blanco, Eduardo
    In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
  8. COLD: Annotation scheme and evaluation data set for complex offensive language in English
    Palmer, Alexis, Carr, Christine, Robinson, Melissa, and Sanders, Jordan
    The Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics 2020
  9. It’s not a Non-Issue: Negation as a Source of Error in Machine Translation
    Hossain, Md Mosharaf, Anastasopoulos, Antonios, Blanco, Eduardo, and Palmer, Alexis
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.05432 2020
  10. It’s not a Non-Issue: Negation as a Source of Error in Machine Translation
    Mosharaf Hossain, Md, Anastasopoulos, Antonios, Blanco, Eduardo, and Palmer, Alexis
    arXiv e-prints 2020
  11. UNT Linguistics at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Linear SVC with Pre-trained Word Embeddings as Document Vectors and Targeted Linguistic Features
    Fromknecht, Jared, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation 2020
  12. UNTLing at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in English News Articles
    Petee, Maia, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation 2020
  13. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
    Herbelot, Aurélie, Zhu, Xiaodan, Palmer, Alexis, Schneider, Nathan, May, Jonathan, and Shutova, Ekaterina
    In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation 2020
  14. Temporally-oriented possession: A corpus for tracking possession over time
    Chinnappa, Dhivya I, Palmer, Alexis, and Blanco, Eduardo
    Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2019
  15. A Corpus of Negations and their Underlying Positive Interpretations
    Sarabi, Zahra, Killian, Erin, Blanco, Eduardo, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (* SEM 2019) 2019
  16. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts
    Nakov, Preslav, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts 2019
  17. Sigmorphon 2019 Task 2 system description paper: Morphological analysis in context for many languages, with supervision from only a few
    Aiken, Brad, Kelly, Jared, Palmer, Alexis, Polat, Suleyman Olcay, Rama, Taraka, and Nielsen, Rodney
    In Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology 2019
  18. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages Volume 1
    Arppe, Antti, Good, Jeff, Hulden, Mans, Lachler, Jordan, Palmer, Alexis, Schwartz, Lane, and Silfverberg, Miikka
    In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages Volume 1 (Papers) 2019
  19. Proceedings of ACL 2019, Tutorial Abstracts
    Nakov, Preslav, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of ACL 2019, Tutorial Abstracts 2019
  20. Determining event durations: Models and error analysis
    Vempala, Alakananda, Blanco, Eduardo, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers) 2018
  21. Classifying Semantic Clause Types With Recurrent Neural Networks: Analysis of Attention, Context & Genre Characteristics
    Becker, Maria, Staniek, Michael, Nastase, Vivi, Palmer, Alexis, and Frank, Anette
    TRAITEMENT AUTOMATIQUE DES LANGUES 2018
  22. Semantic clause types and modality as features for argument analysis 1
    Becker, Maria, Palmer, Alexis, and Frank, Anette
    Argument & Computation 2017
  23. Illegal is not a noun: Linguistic form for detection of pejorative nominalizations
    Palmer, Alexis, Robinson, Melissa, and Phillips, Kristy K
    In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online 2017
  24. Classifying semantic clause types: Modeling context and genre characteristics with recurrent neural networks and attention
    Becker, Maria, Staniek, Michael, Nastase, Vivi, Palmer, Alexis, and Frank, Anette
    In Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (* SEM 2017) 2017
  25. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages
    Arppe, Antti, Good, Jeff, Hulden, Mans, Lachler, Jordan, Palmer, Alexis, and Schwartz, Lane
    In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages 2017
  26. Modeling communicative purpose with functional style: Corpus and features for German genre and register analysis
    Haider, Thomas, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation 2017
  27. Investigating active learning for short-answer scoring
    Horbach, Andrea, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the 11th workshop on innovative use of NLP for building educational applications 2016
  28. Predicting the direction of derivation in English conversion
    Kisselew, Max, Rimell, Laura, Palmer, Alexis, and Padó, Sebastian
    In Proceedings of the 14th sigmorphon workshop on computational research in phonetics, phonology, and morphology 2016
  29. Argumentative texts and clause types
    Becker, Maria, Palmer, Alexis, and Frank, Anette
    In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining2016) 2016
  30. Situation entity types: automatic classification of clause-level aspect
    Friedrich, Annemarie, Palmer, Alexis, and Pinkal, Manfred
    In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) 2016
  31. A pilot study in using argumentation frameworks for online debates
    Cerutti, Federico, Palmer, Alexis, Rosenfeld, Ariel, Šnajder, Jan, and Toni, Francesca
    2016
  32. Clause types and modality in argumentative microtexts
    Becker, Maria, Palmer, Alexis, and Frank, Anette
    In Workshop on foundations of the language of argumentation (in conjunction with COMMA) 2016
  33. Modal sense classification at large: Paraphrase-driven sense projection, semantically enriched classification models and cross-genre evaluations
    Marasović, Ana, Zhou, Mengfei, Palmer, Alexis, and Frank, Anette
    In Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, Volume 14, 2016-Modality: Logic, Semantics, Annotation, and Machine Learning 2016
  34. Evaluating Automation Strategies for Documenting Endangered Languages
    Palmer, Alexis
    2016
  35. Computational Linguistics for Low-Resource Languages
    Palmer, Alexis
    2016
  36. Situation Entity Types
    Friedrich, Annemarie, and Palmer, Alexis
    2015
  37. Obtaining a better understanding of distributional models of German derivational morphology
    Kisselew, Max, Padó, Sebastian, Palmer, Alexis, and Šnajder, Jan
    In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Semantics 2015
  38. Measuring semantic content to assess asymmetry in derivation
    Padó, Sebastian, Palmer, Alexis, Kisselew, Max, and Šnajder, Jan
    In Proceedings of the Workshop on Advances in Distributional Semantics, London, UK 2015
  39. Using shallow syntactic features to measure influences of L1 and proficiency level in EFL writings
    Horbach, Andrea, Poitz, Jonathan, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the fourth workshop on NLP for computer-assisted language learning 2015
  40. Annotating genericity: a survey, a scheme, and a corpus
    Friedrich, Annemarie, Palmer, Alexis, Sørensen, Melissa Peate, and Pinkal, Manfred
    In Proceedings of the 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop 2015
  41. Semantically enriched models for modal sense classification
    Zhou, Mengfei, Frank, Anette, Friedrich, Annemarie, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linking Computational Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics 2015
  42. Linking discourse modes and situation entity types in a cross-linguistic corpus study
    Mavridou, Kleio-Isidora, Friedrich, Annemarie, Sørensen, Melissa Peate, Palmer, Alexis, and Pinkal, Manfred
    In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linking Computational Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics 2015
  43. Finding a Tradeoff between Accuracy and Rater’s Workload in Grading Clustered Short Answers
    Horbach, Andrea, Palmer, Alexis, and Wolska, Magdalena
    In LREC 2014
  44. LQVSumm: A Corpus of Linguistic Quality Violations in Multi-Document Summarization
    Friedrich, Annemarie, Valeeva, Marina, and Palmer, Alexis
    In LREC 2014
  45. lex4all: A language-independent tool for building and evaluating pronunciation lexicons for small-vocabulary speech recognition
    Vakil, Anjana, Paulus, Max, Palmer, Alexis, and Regneri, Michaela
    In Proceedings of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations 2014
  46. Automatic prediction of aspectual class of verbs in context
    Friedrich, Annemarie, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) 2014
  47. Cross-language mapping for small-vocabulary ASR in under-resourced languages: investigating the impact of source language choice
    Vakil, Anjana, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages 2014
  48. Seedling: Building and using a seed corpus for the human language project
    Emerson, Guy, Tan, Liling, Fertmann, Susanne, Palmer, Alexis, and Regneri, Michaela
    In Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages 2014
  49. Short-term projects, long-term benefits: Four student NLP projects for low-resource languages
    Palmer, Alexis, and Regneri, Michaela
    In Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages 2014
  50. Situation entity annotation
    Friedrich, Annemarie, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of LAW VIII-The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop 2014
  51. Computer-assisted scoring of short responses: the efficiency of a clustering-based approach in a real-life task
    Wolska, Magdalena, Horbach, Andrea, and Palmer, Alexis
    In International Conference on Natural Language Processing 2014
  52. CSGS: Adapting a Short Answer Scoring System for Multiple-choice Reading Comprehension Exercises.
    Ostermann, Simon, Koleva, Nikolina, Palmer, Alexis, and Horbach, Andrea
    In CLEF (Working Notes) 2014
  53. Centering Theory in natural text: a large-scale corpus study
    Friedrich, Annemarie, and Palmer, Alexis
    2014
  54. Paraphrase detection for short answer scoring
    Koleva, Nikolina, Horbach, Andrea, Palmer, Alexis, Ostermann, Simon, and Pinkal, Manfred
    In Proceedings of the third workshop on NLP for computer-assisted language learning 2014
  55. Genre Distinctions and Discourse Modes: Text Types Differ in their Situation Type Distributions.
    Palmer, Alexis, and Friedrich, Annemarie
    In ArgNLP 2014
  56. Using the text to evaluate short answers for reading comprehension exercises
    Horbach, Andrea, Palmer, Alexis, and Pinkal, Manfred
    In 2013
  57. Scientific Presentations: Expectations
    Friedrich, Annemarie, and Palmer, Alexis
    2013
  58. Visualising typological relationships: Plotting wals with heat maps
    Littauer, Richard, Turnbull, Rory, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the EACL 2012 Joint Workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH 2012
  59. So to Speak: A Computational and Empirical Investigation of Lexical Cohesion of Non-Literal and Literal Expressions in Text
    Palmer, Alexis, Sporleder, Caroline, and Li, Linlin
    Discours. Revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique. A journal of linguistics, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics 2012
  60. Enhancing Active Learning for Semantic Role Labeling via Compressed Dependency Trees
    Chen, Chenhua, Palmer, Alexis, and Sporleder, Caroline
    In IJCNLP 2011
  61. Robust Semantic Analysis for Unseen Data in FrameNet
    Palmer, Alexis, Alishahi, Afra, and Sporleder, Caroline
    In RANLP 2011
  62. Evaluating FrameNet-style semantic parsing: the role of coverage gaps in FrameNet
    Palmer, Alexis, and Sporleder, Caroline
    In Coling 2010: Posters 2010
  63. Bringing active learning to life
    Rehbein, Ines, Ruppenhofer, Josef, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on computational linguistics (COLING 2010) 2010
  64. Computational strategies for reducing annotation effort in language documentation
    Palmer, Alexis, Moon, Taesun, Baldridge, Jason, Erk, Katrin, Campbell, Eric, and Can, Telma
    Linguistic Issues in Language Technology 2010
  65. Cohesive Links with Literal and Idiomatic Expressions in Discourse: An Empirical and Computational Study
    Sporleder, Caroline, Li, Linlin, and Palmer, Alexis
    Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Signalling Text Organisation 2010
  66. How well does active learning actually work? Time-based evaluation of cost-reduction strategies for language documentation.
    Baldridge, Jason, and Palmer, Alexis
    In Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2009
  67. Evaluating automation strategies in language documentation
    Palmer, Alexis, Moon, Taesun, and Baldridge, Jason
    In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2009 Workshop on Active Learning for Natural Language Processing 2009
  68. Semi-automated annotation and active learning for language documentation
    Palmer, Alexis Mary
    2009
  69. DotCCG and VisCCG: Wiki and programming paradigms for improved grammar engineering with OpenCCG
    Baldridge, Jason, Chatterjee, Sudipta, Palmer, Alexis, and Wing, Ben
    In CSLI STUDIES IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS ONLINE 2007
  70. IGT-XML: An XML format for interlinearized glossed text
    Palmer, Alexis, and Erk, Katrin
    In Proceedings of the linguistic annotation workshop 2007
  71. A sequencing model for situation entity classification
    Palmer, Alexis, Ponvert, Elias, Baldridge, Jason, and Smith, Carlota
    In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics 2007
  72. Proceedings of the 2004 Texas Linguistics Society Conference: Issues at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface
    Denis, Pascal
    2006
  73. Pragmatics Interface
    Denis, Pascal, McCready, Eric, Palmer, Alexis, Reese, Brian, Beyssade, Claire, Marandin, JeanMarie, Caudal, Patrick, Roussarie, Laurent, Goldwater, Micah B, Runner, Jeffrey T, and others,
    Pragmatics 2006
  74. Extracting and using discourse structure to resolve anaphoric dependencies: Combining logico-semantic and statistical approaches
    Asher, Nicholas, Denis, Pascal, Kuhn, Jonas, Larson, Erik, McCready, Eric, Palmer, Alexis, Reese, Brian, and Wang, Linton
    In Proceedings of TALN’04 (Conférence sur le Traitment Automatique du Langage Naturel), Workshop on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory 2004
  75. Utilization of Multiple Language Resources for Robust Grammar-Based Tense and Aspect Classification.
    Palmer, Alexis, Kuhn, Jonas, and Smith, Carlota
    In LREC 2004
  76. Short papers in pharmaceutical analysis
    Charles, I, Robinson, ML, Thacker, Elizabeth, Clarke, Graham S, Robinson, Malcolm L, Palmer, A, Mulholland, M, and Rudd, DR
    In Analytical Proceedings 1985
  77. KMIC: Key Morphemes in Context A Widget among Widgets
    Bender, Emily M, Derrick, Donald, Ngai, Vivian, Palmer, Alexis, Robson, David, Soderland, Stephen, Thomson, John, and Whalen, Doug
  78. Annotation and automatic classification of situation entity types
    Friedrich, Annemarie, and Palmer, Alexis
  79. 4 Working groups 4.1 A Pilot Study in Mining Argumentation Frameworks from Online Debates
    Cerutti, Federico, and Palmer, Alexis M
    Natural Language Argumentation: Mining, Processing, and Reasoning over Textual Arguments
  80. Argumentative texts and clause types
    Palmer, Alexis
  81. JLCL Special Issue on Offensive Language
    Basile, Valerio, Declerck, Thierry, Klenner, Manfred, Jaki, Sylvia, Palmer, Alexis, Schade, Ulrich, Scheffler, Tatjana, Stede, Manfred, Waseem, Zeerak, Wiegand, Michael, and others,

Courses that I am teaching this semester.

Name1

LING 9999

Fall 2022

Syllabus

Course description

Computational Models of Discourse

LING 7800/CSCI 7000

Spring 2022

Syllabus

This course is an introduction to computational models, corpora, and processing methods for discourse and dialogue. The course will introduce students to the foundational concepts and approaches, building a base from which students can go on to do research in these areas.

Resources for students.