About me

I develop computational models of natural language learning, understanding and generation in people and machines, and my research focuses on basic scientific problems related to these models. I am especially interested in modeling the rich diversity of linguistic phenomena across the world’s languages.

I am a Reader in the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. My research group is part of the larger Edinburgh natural language processing group and we collaborate with many people in Edinburgh and more widely. I am also the co-director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science, which offers a four-year MSc + PhD programme.

News

• In June, my awesome PhD student Sorcha Gilroy received an oustanding paper award NAACL 2018 for a very cool paper she coauthored on RNNs as weighted language recognizers. In the same month, she was a finalist in University of Edinburgh 3-minute thesis competition.

• Sorcha Gilroy and I taught a one-week course on Graph formalisms for meaning representations at NASSLLI 2018. We will give a half-day tutorial on the same topic at EMNLP 2018.

Current Highlights

• Neural networks for cross-lingual negation scope detection
  Federico Fancellu, Adam Lopez, and Bonnie Webber. In arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.02156. 2018.
• Pre-training on high-resource speech recognition improves low-resource speech-to-text translation
  Sameer Bansal, Herman Kamper, Karen Livescu, Adam Lopez, and Sharon Goldwater. In arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.01431. 2018.
• What do character-level models learn about morphology? The case of dependency parsing
  Clara Vania, Andreas Grivas, and Adam Lopez. In Proceedings of EMNLP. 2018.
• Indicatements that character language models learn English morpho-syntactic units and regularities
  Yova Kementchedjhieva and Adam Lopez. In Proceedings of the Workshop on analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP. 2018.
• Low-resource speech-to-text translation
  Sameer Bansal, Herman Kamper, Karen Livescu, Adam Lopez, and Sharon Goldwater. In Proceedings of Interspeech. 2018.
• Does ability affect alignment in second language tutorial dialogue?
  Arabella Sinclair, Adam Lopez, Christopher G. Lucas and Dragan Gašević. In Proceedings of SIGDIAL. 2018.
• A structured syntax-semantics interface for English-AMR alignment
  Ida Szubert, Adam Lopez, and Nathan Schneider. In Proceedings of NAACL. 2018.
• Weighted DAG automata for semantic graphs
  David Chiang, Frank Drewes, Daniel Gildea, Adam Lopez, and Giorgio Satta. In Computational Linguistics, 44(1) : pages 119–186,. 2018.
• Parsing graphs with regular graph grammars
  Sorcha Gilroy, Adam Lopez, and Sebastian Maneth. In Proceedings of *SEM. 2017.
• (Re)introducing regular graph languages
  Sorcha Gilroy, Adam Lopez, Sebastian Maneth, and Pijus Simonaitis. In Meeting on the Mathematics of Language. 2017.