Mark Sammons

I am a Principal Research Scientist working with Dan Roth at the Cognitive Computation Group of the Computer Science department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. You can email me at mssammon (at) illinois (dot) edu.

Research Interests

My primary research interests are in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, with a focus on integrating diverse information sources in the context of Textual Entailment. My work has focused on: developing a Textual Entailment framework that can easily incorporate new resources; designing appropriate inference procedures for recognizing entailment; and identifying and developing automated approaches to recognize and represent implicit content in natural language text. Recently, I have been working on identifying inference subtasks in textual inference; incorporating background knowledge via constraints into coreference resolution; spelling correction systems; and on an end-to-end Event extraction system for Machine Reading.

Publications

• M. Sammons, V.G. Vydiswaran, and D. Roth, Recognizing Textual Entailment (Book chapter). Multilingual Natural Language Applications: From Theory to Practice (2012) (Forthcoming).
• K. Chang and R. Samdani and A. Rozovskaya and N. Rizzolo and M. Sammons and D. Roth, Inference Protocols for Coreference Resolution. Proc. of the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) Shared Task - 2011 [info]
• M. Sammons, V.G. Vydiswaran, and D. Roth, Ask not what Textual Entailment can do for you.... Proc. of the Annual Meeting of the ACL (2010) [info] [pdf] [Explanation Based Annotation wiki] [bibitem]
• M. Sammons, V.G. Vydiswaran, T. Vieira, N. Johri, M. Chang, D. Goldwasser, V. Srikumar, G. Kundu, Y. Tu, K. Small, J. Rule, Q. Do, and D. Roth, Relation Alignment for Textual Entailment Recognition. Text Analysis Conference (2009). [pdf] [bibitem]
• Q. Do, D. Roth, M. Sammons, Y. Tu, and V.G. Vydiswaran, Robust, Light-weight Approaches to compute Lexical Similarity. Computer Science Research and Technical Reports, University of Illinois (2009). [pdf] [bibitem]
• D. Roth, M. Sammons, and V.G. Vydiswaran, A Framework for Entailed Relation Recognition. Proc. of the Annual Meeting of the ACL (2009) [pdf] [bibitem]
• D. Roth and M. Sammons, A Unified Representation and Inference Paradigm for Natural Language Processing (Technical report). (2008) [ pdf ] [ bibitem ]
• V. Srikumar, R. Reichart, M. Sammons, A. Rappoport, and D. Roth, Extraction of Entailed Semantic Relations Through Syntax-based Comma Resolution. Proc. of the Annual Meeting of the ACL (2008) [ pdf ] [ bibitem ]
• D. Roth and M. Sammons, Semantic and Logical Inference Model for Textual Entailment. Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing (2007) pp. 107--112 [ pdf ][ bibitem ]
• R. de Salvo Braz, R. Girju, V. Punyakanok, D. Roth, and M. Sammons, An Inference Model for Semantic Entailment in Natural Language. Machine Learning Challenges, Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty, Visual Object Classification and Recognizing Textual Entailment, First PASCAL Machine Learning Challenges Workshop, Revised Selected Papers (2006) pp. 261--286 [ pdf ] [ bibitem ]
• R. Braz, R. Girju, V. Punyakanok, D. Roth, and M. Sammons, An Inference Model for Semantic Entailment in Natural Language. Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (2005) pp. 1678--1679 [ pdf ] [ bibitem ]
• R. Braz, R. Girju, V. Punyakanok, D. Roth, and M. Sammons, Knowledge Representation for Semantic Entailment and Question-Answering. IJCAI-05 Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Question Answering (2005) [ pdf ][ bibitem ]
• R. de Salvo Braz, R. Girju, V. Punyakanok, D. Roth, and M. Sammons, An Inference Model for Semantic Entailment in Natural Language. Proc. of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (2005) [ pdf ][ bibitem ]
• R. Girju, D. Roth, and M. Sammons, Token-level Disambiguation of VerbNet classes. The Interdisciplinary Workshop on Verb Features and Verb Classes (2005) [ pdf ][ bibitem ]

Invited talks

I was invited to speak at the Semantics for Textual Inference workshop at the Linguistics Summer Institute (Boulder, CO, 2011). I gave two presentations:

• NLP Tools to support Textual Inference
• Transformation- and Logic-based Approaches for Recognizing Textual Inference