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Katrin Erk

Professor

Katrin Erk is a professor in both the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research expertise is in the area of computational linguistics, especially semantics. Her work is on distributed, flexible approaches to describing word meaning, and on combining them with logic-based representations of sentences and other larger structures. At the word level, she is studying flexible representations of meaning in context, independent of word sense lists. At the sentence level, she is looking into probabilistic frameworks that can draw weighted inferences from combined logical and distributed representations. Katrin Erk completed her dissertation on tree description languages and ellipsis at Saarland University in 2002.

Research

Research Areas:
Research Interests:
  • Graded, flexible representations of word meaning that do not need a dictionary
  • Combining distributional representations for words (and phrases)
    • logic-based representations at the sentence level
Current Research:

Computational Linguistics, specifically Semantics

Research Labs & Affiliations:
  • Linguistic Department
  • Natural Language Learning reading group

Select Publications

Pengxiang Cheng and Katrin Erk. 2019. Implicit Argument Prediction as Reading Comprehension..

Su Wang, Eric Holgate, Greg Durrett, and Katrin Erk. October 2018. Picking Apart Story Salads. Association for Computational Linguistics. Brussels, Belgium.

Pengxiang Cheng and Katrin Erk. June 2018. Implicit argument prediction with event knowledge. Association for Computational Linguistics. New Orleans, Louisiana.

Su Wang, Greg Durrett, and Katrin Erk. 2018. Modeling semantic plausibility by injecting world knowledge . Association for Computational Linguistics. New Orleans, Louisiana.

Katrin Erk. January 2018. Computational Semantics. .

View complete list

Awards & Honors

  • 2017 - CSLI Fellow, Stanford
  • 2013 - College Research Fellowship, UT Austin
  • 2009 - Big XII Faculty Fellowship, Dean of Graduate Studies, UT Austin
  • 2008 - Dean’s Fellowship, Dean of Graduate Studies, UT Austin
  • 2007 - Summer Research Assignment, Dean of Graduate Studies, UT Austin
  • 1998-2001 - Doctoral dissertation scholarship of DFG (German Research Foundation)
  • 1995-1998 - Scholarship of Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
  • 1994-1995 - Scholarship of DAAD (German academic exchange service)

Contact Info

Katrin Erk
Professor
Homepage
katrin.erk@mail.utexas.edu
RLP 4.734
Tuesdays 2-3, Thursdays 1:30-3:30
CV