Lauri Karttunen

I am a computational linguist at PARC and a Consulting Professor in Linguistics at Stanford. In the past several years I have done a lot of work on finite-state technology and its linguistic applications. Currently I am back in semantics thinking about local textual inference.

I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1969 on a semantics dissertation about discourse referents, and pronoun/antecedent relations (Bach-Peters sentences, paycheck pronouns). As a Linguistics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, 1969-1983, I worked mostly on semantics. My papers from that period are about topics such as implicative verbs, presuppositions, conventional implicatures, and questions. During my last years at UT I became more and more interested in computational issues. The 1983 KIMMO system was an early implementation of two-level morphology. At the SRI AI Laboratory in 1984-1987 my main interest was a unification-based grammar formalism, SRI's PATR-II. If you are interested in vintage papers from these years, please visit my Paper Archive.

At PARC since 1987 and at XRCE between 1993-2000, I have contributed to finite-state technology and its application to morphology and syntax. In 2003 Kenneth R. Beesley and and I published a textbook on Finite State Morphology that comes with software for creating and using finite-state networks. The book has its own web site. A new edition is in the making. There are many commercial applications of that technology starting with Inxight in 1997, a PARC spin-off now part of SAP. I am currently working with Powerset, a startup company that has adapted PARC technology to improve the quality of search on the internet. Powerset was recently acquired by Microsoft's Live Search business unit, now rebranded as Bing.

The Association for Computational Linguistics gives each year at its Annual Meeting a “Lifetime Achievement Award.” I became the recipient of the 2007 award at the 45th Annual Meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, June 26, 2007. See the video  of the award ceremony and my acceptance speech, “Word Play.”  The written version of the talk appeared in the December 2007 issue of Computational Linguistics. The Linguistics Department at Indiana University honored me with a Distinguished Alumni Award in April 2009. My acceptance speech tells the story of how I got Bloomington.

This Winter quarter 2010 Arto Anttila, Paul Kiparsky and I are teaching together a course on The Structure of Finnish at Stanford.

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Recent Publications

New Features in PARC's Finite-State Toolkit. Poster presentation at CIAA-2008. San Francisco, July 21, 2008.

Word Play. Computational Linguistics 33:4 443-467. 2007.

(with D.B. Bobrow, B. Cheslow, C. Condoravdi, V. de Paiva, T. H. King, R. Nairn, V. de Paiva, C. Price, A. Zaenen) PARC’s Bridge and Question AnsweringSystem. In Proceedings of the GEAF 2007 Workshop. CSLI Studies in Computational Linguistics.

(with D.B. Bobrow, C. Condoravdi, V. de Paiva, T. H. King, R. Nairn, C. Price, A. Zaenen) Precision-focused Textual Inference. In the Proceedings of ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, June 28-29, 2007. Prague, Czech Republic.

The Insufficiency of Paper-and-Pencil Linguistics: the Case of Finnish Prosody. In Intelligent Linguistic Architectures: Variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, Miriam Butt, Mary Dalrymple, and Tracy Holloway King (eds), pp. 287-300, CSLI Publications, Stanford, California, 2006.

(with Rowan Nairn and Cleo Condoravdi) Computing relative polarity for textual inference. In the Proceedings of ICoS-5 (Inference in Computational Semantics). April 20-21, 2006. Buxton, UK.

Numbers and Finnish Numerals. In A Man of Measure Festschrift in Honour of Fred Karlsson on his 60th Birthday, a special supplement to SKY Journal of Linguistics, vol 19:2006, Mickael Suominen, Antti Arppe, Anu Airola, Orvokki Heinämäki, Matti Miestamo, Urho Määttä, Jussi Niemi, Kari K. Pitkänen and Kaius Sinnemäki (eds.) pp. 407-421.

(with Kenneth R. Beesley) Twenty-five years of finite-state morphology. In Inquiries into Words, Constraints and Contexts. Festschrift for Kimmo Koskenniemi on his 60th Birthday(2005), Antti Arppe, Lauri  Carlson, Krister Lindén, Jussi Piitulainen, Mickael Suominen, Martti Vainio, Hanna Westerlund and Anssi Yli-Jyrä (eds.), pp. 71-83, CSLI Studies in Computational Linguistics ONLINE, Copestake, Ann (Series Editor). CSLI Publications, Stanford, California. 2005.

(with Annie Zaenen and Richard Crouch) Local Textual Inference: can it be defined or circumscribed? ACL 2005 Workshop on Empirical Modelling of Semantic Equivalence and Entailment. June 30, 2005. Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Counterpoint: Christopher D. Manning. Local Textual Inference: It's hard to circumscribe, but you know it when you see it - and NLP needs it. MS. Stanford University. 2006.

(with Richard Crouch and Annie Zaenen) Circumscribing is not excluding: A reply to Manning. MS. Palo Alto Research Center. 2006.

(with Annie Zaenen) Veridicity. In Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events. Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings 05151, G. Katz, J. Pustejovsky, F. Schilder (eds.), Dagstuhl, Germany. 2005.

(with Kenneth R. Beesley) Finite State Morphology. CSLI Publications. Stanford University. 2003. The book can be ordered from CSLI Publications and from Chicago University Press. Visit the FSM Book Home Page for additional excercises, code examples, FAQ, errata and other related materials.

Finite-State Technology. In The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, Ruslan Mitkov, ed., pages 339-357. Oxford University Press. 2003.

Computing with Realizational Morphology. In Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, Alexander Gelbukh (ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2588, pages 205-216, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg. 2003. 

Some Classic Papers on Semantics

Discourse Referents. In Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. Javeier Gutiérrez-Rexach (ed.), Vol. III, pages 20-39. Routledge, 2003. Also in Syntax and Semantics 7: Notes from the Linguistic Underground, 363-85, J. D. McCawley (ed.), Academic Press, New York 1976. Translations: Textreferenten. In Semantik und Generative Grammatik, pages 175-197, F. Kiefer (ed.), Athenaeum, Frankfurt 1972; Referenti testuali.  In La linguistica testuale, pages 121-147, M.-E. Conte (ed.), Feltrinelli, Milan 1977. The first version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of Coling'69.

Syntax and Semantics of Questions. In Formal Semantics. The Essential Readings. Paul Portner and Barbara H. Partee (eds.), pages 382-420. Blackwell, 2003. Also in Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. Javeier Gutiérrez-Rexach (ed.), Vol. V, pages 207-249. Routledge, 2003 and in Questions,  H. Hiz (ed.), pages 165-210, Reidel, Dordrecht 1978.  Originally appeared in Linguistics and Philosophy 1 1-44, 1977.

(with Stanley Peters) Conventional Implicature. in Syntax and Semantics 11, Presupposition, pages 1-56, C.-K. Oh and D. A. Dinneen (eds.), Academic Press, New York 1979.

Presupposition and Linguistic Context. Theoretical Linguistics 1 181-94, 1974. Also in Pragmatics: A Reader, Steven Davis (ed.), pages 406-415, Oxford University Press, 1991. Translation: Presuposición y contexto lingüistico. In Textos clásicos de pragmática (eds.), pages 175-192, María Teresea Julio and Ricardo Muños, Arco Libros, Madrid 1998.
 
The Logic of English Predicate Complement Constructions. Publications of the Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington 1971. Translations: Die Logik englischer Prädikatkomplement-konstruktionen. in Generative Semantik, 243-78, W. Abraham and R. Binnick (eds.), Athenaeum, Frankfurt 1973; La logique des constructions anglaises à complément prédicatif. Langages 8 56-80, 1973.

Paper Archive

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