Mark Sammons

I am a Research Assistant Professor 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 applied 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 textual entailment; and identifying and developing automated approaches to recognize and represent implicit content in natural language text. I have worked 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. Recently, I have been collaborating with researchers in social science and the humanities to apply NLP to investigate research questions in those fields.

Publications

• Chen-Tse Tsai and Stephen Mayhew and Yangqiu Song and Mark Sammons and Dan Roth. Illinois CCG LoReHLT 2016 Named Entity Recognition and Situation Frame Systems. Machine Translation - 2018 [info]
• Daniel Khashabi, Mark Sammons, Ben Zhou, Tom Redman, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Vivek Srikumar, Nicholas Rizzolo, Lev Ratinov, Guanheng Luo, Quang Do, Chen-Tse Tsai, Subhro Roy, Stephen Mayhew, Zhili Feng, John Wieting, Xiaodong Yu, Yangqiu Song, Shashank Gupta, Shyam Upadhyay, Naveen Arivazhagan, Qiang Ning, Shaoshi Ling, Dan Roth. CogCompNLP: Your Swiss Army Knife for NLP. 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference - 2018 [info]
• Parisa Kordjamshidi, Sameer Singh, Daniel Khashabi, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Mark Sammons, Saurabh Sinha, and Dan Roth. Relational Learning and Feature Extraction by Querying over Heterogeneous Information Networks. Seventh International Workshop on Statistical Relational AI (StarAI) - 2017 [info]
• Chase Duncan and Liang-Wei Chan and Haoruo Peng and Hao Wu and Shyam Upadhyay and Nitish Gupta and Chen-Tse Tsai and Mark Sammons and Dan Roth UI CCG TAC-KBP2017 Submissions: Entity Discovery and Linking, and Event Nugget Detection and Co-reference. Text Analysis Conference (TAC) - 2017 [info]
• Alla Rozovskaya, Dan Roth, and Mark Sammons. Adapting to Learner Errors with Minimal Supervision. Computational Linguistics - 2017 [info]
• Mark Sammons, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Daniel Khashabi, Vivek Srikumar, Paul Vijayakumar, Mazin Bokhari, Xinbo Wu, Dan Roth EDISON: Feature Extraction for NLP, Simplified. LREC - 2016 [info]
• Chen-Tse Tsai and Stephen Mayhew and Haoruo Peng and Mark Sammons and Bhargav Mangipundi and Pavankumar Reddy and Dan Roth. Illinois CCG Entity Discovery and Linking, Event Nugget Detection and Co-reference, and Slot Filler Validation Systems for TAC 2016. Text Analysis Conference (TAC) - 2016 [info]
• Mark Sammons, Haoruo Peng, Yangqiu Song, Shyam Upadhyay, Chen-Tse Tsai, Pavankumar Reddy, Subhro Roy, Dan Roth. Illinois CCG TAC 2015 Event Nugget, Entity Discovery and Linking, and Slot Filler Validation Systems. TAC - 2015 [info]
• Y. Song and H. Peng and P. Kordjamshidi and M. Sammons and D. Roth. Improving a Pipeline Architecture for Shallow Discourse Parsing. Proc. of the Conference on Computational Language Learning Sharedd Task - 2015 [info]
• M. Sammons and Y. Song and R. Wang and G. Kundu and C.-T. Tsai and S. Upadhyay and S. Mayhew and D. Roth and S. Ancha. Overview of UI-CCG Systems for Event Argument Extraction, Entity Discovery and Linking, and Slot Filler Validation. Text Analysis Conference (2014) [info
• A. Rozovskaya and K.-W. Chang and M. Sammons and D. Roth and N. Habash. The Illinois-Columbia System in the CoNLL-2014 Shared Task. CoNLL Shared Task (2014) [info]
• H. Wu and Z. Fei and A. Dai and S. Mayhew and M. Sammons and D, Roth. IllinoisCloudNLP: Text Analytics Services in the Cloud. LREC (2014) [info]
• I. Dagan and D. Roth and M. Sammons and F. Zanzotto. Recognizing Textual Entailment: Models and Applications (2013) [info]
• X. Cheng and B. Chen and R. Samdani and K.-W. Chang and Z. Fei and M. Sammons and J. Wieting and S. Roy and C. Wang and D. Roth. Illinois Cognitive Computation Group UI-CCG TAC 2013 Entity Linking and Slot Filler Validation Systems. TAC (2013) [info ]
• A. Rozovskaya and K.-W. Chang and M. Sammons and D. Roth. The University of Illinois System in the CoNLL-2013 Shared Task. CoNLL Shared Task (2013) [info]
• M. Sammons and V. Vydiswaran and D. Roth. Recognizing Textual Entailment. Multilingual Natural Language Applications: From Theory to Practice (2012) pp.209-258 [info]
• K.-W. Chang and R. Samdani and A. Rozovskaya and M. Sammons and D. Roth. Illinois-Coref: The UI System in the CoNLL-2012 Shared Task. CoNLL Shared Task (2012) [info]
• J. Clarke and V. Srikumar and M. Sammons and D. Roth. An NLP Curator (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love NLP Pipelines) LREC (2012) [info]
• A. Rozovskaya and M. Sammons and D. Roth. The UI System in the HOO 2012 Shared Task on Error Correction. NAACL Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (2012) [info]
• 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