Semantics at the Crossroads. From Theoretical Explorations to Implementations

After obtaining her Ph.D. in linguistics at Harvard in 1980, Annie Zaenen worked on Scandinavian syntax and general linguistic theory in LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar), especially on long-distance dependencies and functional uncertainty. She contributed to the development of two level morphologies at Xerox PARC and managed the linguistic area of the Xerox European Research Center in France in the 1990s. She retired from PARC in 2011 and is now an adjunct professor at Stanford and a doctor honors causa of Universität Konstanz.

Stephen Pulman was a co-founder of TheySay Ltd, a sentiment analysis company which was spun out of the Department of Computer Science in 2010, and acquired by Aptean in 2017. After retirement from Oxford University in 2017, he became an Emeritus Professorial Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Computer Science. He also took up a position as Senior Natural Language Research Scientist for Apple.

Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli is currently a Data Scientist and NLP Specialist at the Bundesdruckerei GmbH, Germany. Previously, she worked as an Assistant Professor - PostDoc Researcher at the Center for Information and Speech Processing (CIS) of the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. Before that, Aikaterini acquired her Ph.D. at the University of Konstanz. Her main research interests lie in natural language inference, semantic parsing and the limitations of Large Language Models.

Tracy Holloway King is a senior principal scientist in Adobe Inc.’s Search and Discovery team. She has held applied science roles at Adobe, Amazon, Microsoft, and eBay. She began her career in Xerox PARC’s Natural Language Theory and Technology group after earning her Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University