Institute of Informatics  

Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500

Porto Alegre - RS

Brazil

CEP 91501-970

Office: 235

Phone: (+55) 51 3316 7035

Fax: (+55) 51 3316 7308

Email: avillavicencio at inf <dot> ufrgs <dot> br

Machine Learning applied to Computational Linguistics, with emphasis in language learning from corpora and on-line resources, and models of human language acquisition

Grammar Engineering and Development, especially with defaults and constraint-based linguistic formalisms (HPSG, CG, LFG)

Resources including hierarchies, ontologies, and the semantic web

Prior to that (2004-2005) I worked as a Senior Researcher on the Noun Phrase Agreement and Coordination  Project, with Louisa Sadler, in the Department of Language and Linguistics of the University of Essex.  

From 2001 to 2004 I also worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Natural Language and Information Processing Group, in the Computer Laboratory, on the Multiword Expression Project and on the Politeness  Project, with Ann Copestake. 

I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge (Computer Laboratory, Hughes Hall) in 2003. My thesis is entitled The Acquisition of a Unification-Based Generalised Categorial Grammar, and I investigate the acquisition of grammatical knowledge from a corpus of child-directed transcribed speech, using a cognitive computational model, equiped with a Universal Grammar. A description of the learning system and some experiments perfomed can be found in The Acquisition of a Unification-Based Generalised Categorial Grammar, The acquisition of word order by a computational learning system, and Grammatical Learning Using Unification-Based Generalised Categorial Grammars. The results obtained in experiments demonstrate that the resulting learner can successfully acquire constituent order parameters even in the presence of noise in the mapping to logical forms. This research was done under the supervision of  Ted Briscoe.

Before doing the PhD, I did the MPhil course in Computer Speech and Language Processing, in the Engineering Department, also in the University of Cambridge, and an MSc in Computer Sciences from the Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. I did my  undergraduate studies in Computer Science at the The Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul.

• Baldwin, T., Kordoni, V. and Villavicencio, A.
  
Prepositions in Applications: A Survey and Introduction to the Special Issue
Computational Linguistics, 35(2), pp. 119—149, 2009



• Tonietto, L., Villavicencio, A., Siqueira, M. S. G., Parente, M. A. M. P., Sperb, T. M.
  A especificidade semântica como fator determinante na aquisição de verbos.
Revista Psico, v. 29, p. 343-351, 2008.
    

• Villavicencio,  A.
  The Availability of Verb-Particle Constructions: How much is Enough?.
  Computer Speech & Language, Volume de Setembro de 2005, v. 19, n. 4, p. 415-432, 2005.
   
  
• Villavicencio,  A., Bond, F., Korhonen, A., McCarthy, D.
  Introduction to the Special Issue on Multiword Expressions: having a crack at a hard nut. Computer Speech & Language, Inglaterra, v. 19, n. 4, p. 365-377, 2005. 


• Villavicencio, A., Sadler, L. and Arnold, D. 

An HPSG Account of Closest Conjunct Agreement in NP Coordination in Portuguese.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 2005.

• 
  
• Villavicencio, A., Sadler, L. and Arnold, D. 

An HPSG Account of Closest Conjunct Agreement in NP Coordination in Portuguese.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 2005.

• Villavicencio, A. and Sadler, L. 
  Agreement Patterns in Corpora. 
  In Proceedings of Workshop on exploring Syntactically Annotated Corpora, Corpus Linguistics 2005, Birmingham, 2005.

• Villavicencio, A., T. Baldwin, B. Waldron. 
  A Multilingual Database of Idioms. 
  In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference On Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-2004, Lisboa, 2004.

• Villavicencio, A., A. Copestake, B. Waldron, F. Lambeau (2004). 
  The Lexical Encoding of MWEs. 
  In T.Tanaka, A. Villavicencio, F. Bond, A. Korhonen eds. Proceedings of the ACL 2004 Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing. Barcelona, 2004.

• Villavicencio, A. 
  Verb-Particle Constructions and Lexical Resources. 
  In Francis Bond, Anna Korhonen, Diana McCarthy and Aline Villavicencio, eds. Proceedings of the ACL 2003 Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Analysis, Acquisition and Treatment, p. 57—64. Sapporo, 2003. ps.gz

• Terkourafi, M. and Villavicencio, A. 
  Toward a formalisation of speech-act functions of questions in conversation. 
  In Proceedings of the 2nd CoLogNET-ElsNET Symposium: Questions and Answers: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives. Amsterdam, 2003.pdf

• Buttery, P. and Villavicencio, A. 
  Language Acquisition and the Universal Grammar. 
  Proceedings of AMLaP'2003: Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing. Glasgow, 2003.

• Villavicencio, A. 
  Verb-Particle Constructions in the World Wide Web. 
  Proceedings of the ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications. Toulouse, France, 2003.ps.gz

• Villavicencio, A. and A. Copestake. 
  Verb-particle constructions in a computational grammar of English. 
  In Jongbok Kim and Stephen Wechsler, eds., Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Kyung-Hee University, Seoul. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Available at: http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/HPSG/3/hpsg02.htm.

• Copestake, A.,  F. Lambeau, A. Villavicencio, F. Bond, T. Baldwin, I. A. Sag and D. Flickinger. 
  Multiword expressions: linguistic precision and reusability. 
  Proceedings of the Third conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2002), p. 1941—1947. Las Palmas, Canary Islands, 2002.

• Baldwin, T. and A. Villavicencio. 
  Extracting the unextractable: A case study on verb-particles.
  Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2002), Taipei, Taiwan, 2002.

• Villavicencio, A. 
  Learning to distinguish PP arguments from adjuncts. 
  Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2002), Taipei, Taiwan, 2002.

• Villavicencio, A. 
  The Acquisition of a Unification-Based Generalised Categorial Grammar. 
  Thesis published as Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR-533, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, 2001.pdf

• Villavicencio, A.
  The acquisition of word order by a computational learning system. 
  Proceedings of the 2nd Learning Language in Logic Workshop, Lisbon, 2000.ps.gz

• Villavicencio, A.
  The Use of Default Unification in a System of Lexical Types. 
  Proceedings of the Workshop on Linguistic Theory and Grammar Implementation, Birmingham, 2000.ps.gz

• Villavicencio, A.
  Grammatical Learning Using Unification-Based Generalised Categorial Grammars. 
  Proceedings of AMLaP' 2000: Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Leiden, 2000.doc.gz

• Villavicencio, A.
  The Acquisition of a Unification-Based Generalised Categorial Grammar. 
  Proceedings of Cluk, Brighton, 2000.ps.gz

• Villavicencio, A.
  Representing a System of Lexical Types Using Default Unification. 
  Proceedings of EACL, Bergen, 1999.ps.gz

• Villavicencio, A.
Building a Wide-Coverage Combinatory Categorial Grammar. 
MPhil Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1997.ps.gz

• Villavicencio, A., Viccari, R.M.
  Evaluating Stochastic Past-of-Speech Taggers for the Portuguese Language.
  Second Meeting of the Computational Processing of Spoken and Written Portuguese Language, 1996.

• Villavicencio, A., Marques, N.M., Lopes, J.G.P.,Villavicencio, F.
  Part-of-Speech tagging for Portuguese Texts",(ed.)
  In Jacques Wainer and Ariadne Carvalho, eds. Advances in Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings of the of the XII Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence , 1995. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 991, pp. 323-332. Springer Verlag.
  
  
  

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