Publications

Books

• Merlo P., Parsing with Principles and Classes of Information, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
• P. Merlo and S. Stevenson, Eds. (2002), The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing: Formal, Computational and Experimental Issues, John Benjamins Publishers, Amsterdam.
• Harry Bunt, Paola Merlo and Joakim Nivre, Eds. (2010), Trends in Parsing Technology, Springer Verlag.

Proceedings

• Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, and Reut Tsarfaty. 2021. Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume. Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, edition.

Papers

(for an almost complete and mostly up-to-date list, look on Google scholar)

• Paola Merlo and Giuseppe Samo (2022), Exploring T3 languages with quantitative computational syntax, Theoretical Linguistics.  Special  Issue  Slavic languages – “SVO” languages without SVO qualities? 48(1-2, pp 49-55. (preprint)

• Suzanne Stevenson and Paola Merlo (2022), Beyond the Benchmarks: Toward Human-like Lexical Representations, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, section Language and Computation. Special Issue  Perspectives for Natural Language Processing between AI, Linguistics and Cognitive Science. A. Lenci and S. Pado editors. 
• Paola Merlo, Aixiu An and Maria Rodriguez, Blackbird's language matrices (BLMs): a new benchmark to investigate disentangled generalisation in neural networks, ArXiv 2205.10866. 
  

• Giuseppe Samo, Paola Merlo (2021) Intervention effects in clefts: a study in quantitative computational syntax, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6 (1).

• Haozhou Wang, James Henderson, and Paola Merlo. 2021. Multi-Adversarial Learning for Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 463–472, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.

• Maria A. Rodriguez and Paola Merlo (2020),``Word associations and the distance properties of context-aware word embeddings'', Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Learning (CONLL'19), online.

• Kristina Gulordava and Paola Merlo (2020), ``Computational Quantitative Syntax: The Case of Universal 18'', Collection from LSRL 47, John Benjamins. (preprint)

• Paola Merlo (2019), ``Probing word and sentence embeddings for long-distance dependencies effects in French and English'', Proceedings of the 2019 ACL Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, pp. 158-172.

• Paola Merlo and Maria A. Rodriguez (2019), ``Cross-lingual word embeddings and the structure of the human bilingual lexicon'', Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Learning (CONLL'19), Brussels.

• Haozhou Wang, James Henderson and Paola Merlo (2019), ``Weakly-Supervised Concept-based Adversarial Learning for Cross-lingual Word Embeddings'', Proceedings of the conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, November, Hong Kong.

• Paola Merlo and Francesco Ackermann (2018), ``Vectorial semantic spaces do not encode human judgments of intervention similarity'', Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Learning (CONLL'18), Brussels.

• Paola Merlo and Sarah Ouwayda (2018), ``Movement and structure effects on Universal 20 word order frequencies: A quantitative study'', Glossa, 3(1), 84, 1-35.

• Tanja Samardzic and Paola Merlo (2018), ``Probability of external causation: an empirical account of cross-linguistic variation in lexical causatives'', Linguistics, 56(5), 895-938.

•  Paola Merlo (2016), ``Some Recent Results on Cross-linguistic, Corpus-based Quantitative Modelling of Word Order and Aspect'', In Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Grisot, Eds. Formal models in the study of language: A festschrift for Jacques Moeschler, Springer.

• Kristina Gulordava, Paola Merlo.  Multi-lingual Dependency Parsing Evaluation: a Large-scale Analysis of Word Order Properties using Artificial Data. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2016. 

• Paola Merlo,  Quantitative computational syntax: some initial results. Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics, 2(1),  2016.

• Paola Merlo, Predicting Word Order Universals, Journal of Language Modelling, Vo. 3, No. 2, 2015.

• Paola Merlo, Evaluation of Two-level Dependency Representations of Argument Structure in Long-Distance Dependencies, International Conference on Dependency Linguistic, Uppsala, 2015.

• Kristina Gulordava; Paola Merlo; Benoit Crabbé  Dependency length minimisation effects in short spans: a large-scale analysis of adjective placement in complex noun phrases, Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2015, Beijing.

• Kristina Gulordava and Paola Merlo, Structural and lexical factors in adjective placement in complex noun phrases across Romance languages, Conference on Natural Language Learning, (CONLL'15).

• Kristina Gulordava and Paola Merlo, Diachronic Trends in Word Order Freedom and Dependency Length in Dependency-Annotated Corpora of Latin and Ancient Greek, International Conference on Dependency Linguistic, Uppsala, 2015.
  
  

• Samardžić, T. and P. Merlo (2014) " Likelihood of External Causation in the Structure of Events", In Proceedings of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Causality in Language (CAtoCL), Gothenburg, Sweden, 40-47 
  
  

• J.Henderson, P.Merlo, I.Titov, and G.Musillo, Multilingual Joint Parsing of Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies with a Latent Variable Model. Computational Linguistics, December 2013, Vol. 39, No. 4.

• Samardžić, T. and P. Merlo (2012) “The Meaning of Lexical Causatives in Cross-Linguistic Variation“, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology 7/12, CSLI Publications, 1-14.

• Lonneke van der Plas, Paola Merlo and James Henderson (2011) "Scaling up Cross-Lingual Semantic Annotation Transfer" In Proceedings of ACL/HLT, Portland, US. [pdf]
  
  

• van der Plas, L., T. Samardzic, and P. Merlo (2010) "Cross-lingual Validity of PropBank in the Manual Annotation of French ", In Proceedings of the 4th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (The LAW IV), Uppsala. [pdf]
  
  
• Samardzic, T. and P. Merlo (2010) "Cross-lingual Variation of Light Verb Constructions: Using Parallel Corpora and Automatic Alignment for Linguistic Research", In Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Workshop 'NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground', Uppsala. [pdf]
  
  
• Samardzic, T., L, van der Plas, G. Kashaeva, and P. Merlo (2010) "The Scope and the Sources of Variation in Verbal Predicates in English and French", In Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Tartu, 199-211. [pdf]
  
  

• P. Merlo and L. van der Plas (2009), "Abstraction and Generalisation in Semantic Role Labels: PropBank, VerbNet or both?", Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2009, Singapore.[pdf]

• I. Titov, J. Henderson, P. Merlo and G. Musillo (2009), "Online Graph Planarisation for Synchronous Parsing of Semantic and Syntactic Dependencies", Proceedings of IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, CA. [pdf]

• Gesmundo A., J. Henderson, P. Merlo and I. Titov (2009) "A Latent Variable Model of Synchronous Syntactic-Semantic Parsing for Multiple Languages" Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Learning (CONLL 2009), Shared Task, Boulder, CO.[pdf]

• Lonneke van der Plas, James Henderson and Paola Merlo (2009) "Domain adaptation with artificial data for semantic parsing of speech", Proceedings of NAACL 2009, short paper, Boulder,CO.[pdf]

• Merlo P., G. Musillo (2008) "Semantic Parsing for High-Precision Semantic Role Labelling", CONLL 2008 [pdf]

• Henderson, J. Paola Merlo, Gabriele Musillo and Ivan Titov (2008) "A Latent Variable Model of Synchronous Parsing for Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies", CONLL 08 shared task [pdf]

• Gabriele Musillo and Paola Merlo (2008) "Unlexicalised Hidden Variable Models of Split Dependency Grammars", ACL 2008 [pdf]

• Merlo P., E. Esteve Ferrer (2006) "The Notion of Argument in PP Attachment", Computational Linguistics 32(2). [pdf]

• G. Musillo, P. Merlo (2006) "Accurate Parsing of the Proposition Bank" NAACL 2006 [pdf]

• G. Musillo, P. Merlo (2006) " Robust Parsing of the Proposition Bank" ROMAND, EACL 2006 workshop, Trento [pdf]

• Merlo P., G. Musillo (2005) "Accurate Function Parsing", EMNLP 2005, Vancouver, Canada, 620--627. [pdf]

• G. Musillo, P. Merlo (2005) "Lexical and Structural Biases for Function Parsing", IWPT 2005, Vancouver, Canada, 83--93. [pdf]

• G. Musillo, P. Merlo (2005) "Assigning Function Labels to Unparsed Text", RANLP 2005, Borovetz, Bulgaria, 340--347. [pdf]

• P. Merlo S. Stevenson (2004) "Structure and Frequency in Verb Classification", Incontro di Grammatica Generativa, Venice, Italy. [pdf]

• P. Merlo (2003) "Generalised PP-attachment Disambiguation using Corpus-based Linguistic Diagnostics", EACL, Budapest, Hungary, 251--258. [pdf]

• P. Merlo, J. Henderson, G. Schneider and E. Wehrli (2003), ``Learning Document Similarity using NLP'', Linguistik-online

• S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (2002). ``Words, numbers and all that: the lexicon in sentence understanding.'' In P. Merlo and S. Stevenson, Eds., The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing: Formal, Computational and Experimental Issues, 1-38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Introduction to edited volume)

• Merlo P., S. Stevenson, V. Tsang and G. Allaria (2002) "A Multilingual Paradigm for Automatic Verb Classification", Procs. of the 40th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'02). [pdf]

• Merlo P and S. Stevenson (2001) "Automatic Verb Classification based on Statistical Distribution of Argument Structure", Computational Linguistics,  27:3, pp. 373--408.  (pdf file)

• Merlo P. and M. Leybold  (2001) " Automatic Distinction of Arguments and Modifiers: the Case of Prepositional Phrases", Workshop on Computational Language  Learning (Connl 2001), Toulouse, France.  (postscript )

• Stevenson S. and P. Merlo, (2000) "Automatic Lexical Acquisition Based on Statistical Distributions", COLING 2000, Saarbruecken, Germany. (postscript)

• Merlo P. and S. Stevenson (2000), ``Lexical Syntax and Parsing Architecture'', Architecture and Mechanisms of Sentence Processing, M. Crocker, M. Pickering e C. Clifton (eds.), Cambridge University Press. (version postscript)

• Merlo P. and S.Stevenson (1999). ``Language Acquisition and Ambiguity Resolution: The Role of Frequency Distributions.'' Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Vancouver, Canada, August, 1999. (postscript)

• Stevenson S., P.Merlo, N.Kariaeva, and K.Whitehouse (1999). ``Supervised Learning of Lexical Semantic Verb Classes Using Frequency Distributions.'' Proceedings of SigLex99: Standardizing Lexical Resources. College Park, Maryland, June, 1999. (postscript)

• Stevenson S. and P.Merlo (1999). ``Automatic Verb Classification Using Grammatical Features.'' Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics\/},45--52. Bergen, Norway, June, 1999. (postscript)

• Berthouzoz C. et P. Merlo (1998), ``Statistical Ambiguity Resolution for Grammar-based Parsing'', Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing: Selected Papers from RANLP'97, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Nicolas Nicolov et Ruslan Mitkov (eds.), John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. (postscript)

• Merlo P. et S. Stevenson (1998), ``What Grammars Tell Us about Corpora: the Case of Reduced Relative Clauses'', Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Very Large Corpora, Montreal, CA, 134--142. (postscript)

• Barbero C., Lombardo V., Lesmo L. et P. Merlo (1998), ``Integration of Syntactic and Lexical Information in a Hierarchical Dependency Grammar'', Proceedings of the Workshop on Processing of Dependency-based Grammars, Montreal, CA, 58--67.

• Stevenson S. and P. Merlo (1997). ``Lexical Structure and Parsing Complexity.'' Language and Cognitive Processes,12: 2, 1997.

• Merlo P., Crocker M., and Berthouzoz C.,`` Attaching Multiple Prepositional Phrases: Generalized Backed-Off Estimation", Proceedings of the Second Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Providence, RI, 1997. (available from the cmp-lg archives.)

• Berthouzoz C. and P. Merlo``Statistical Ambiguity Resolution for Principle-based Parsing', Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP-97), Bulgaria, 1997.

• Berthouzoz C. and P. Merlo ``Filtrage Structurel versus Filtrage Statistique: Expériences sur la Résolution de l'Ambiguïté Syntaxique. Actes des 1ères JST FRANCIL, pp 353-359, Avignon, 1997.

• Merlo P.,"Grammatica Modulare e Parsing ", Sistemi Intelligenti, 8(1), 99--121, 1996.

• Merlo P.,"Modularity and Information Content Classes in Principle-based Parsing", Computational Linguistics, 21(4), 515-541, 1995.

• Merlo P. (1994),``A Corpus-based Analysis of Verb Continuation Frequencies for Sentence Processing." Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Special Issue on Sentence Processing, 23(6), 435--457.

• Merlo P. (1989),``Risultative in Italiano ed Inglese." Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, 14, 29--55.