I am a final-year PhD student, expecting to graduate in 2013. My advisor is Prof. Ari Rappoport. I studied mathematics and cognitive sciences in the Hebrew University, and graduated with a B.Sc (summa cum laude) in 2006.

I conduct research on grammatical representation from various perspectives, including its relation with syntax and with lexical semantics. In the first half of my PhD, I worked mostly on unsupervised approaches to grammar, asking what can be learned without manual annotation (see publication list below). The second half was devoted to developing a novel approach to grammatical representation, asking what grammatically-relevant information should be manually encoded and how. Our approach is inspired by semantic and cognitive approaches to grammar.

Generally speaking, I hope NLP will teach us something new and interesting about language and human cognition.

Since 2009 I am a member of the Azrieli Fellows Program.

My CV can be found here.

| Publications | Community | Download | Teaching | Contact Info |

Publications

• Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA).
  Omri Abend and Ari Rappoport, ACL 2013 (full paper).
  [Paper: pdf][Data and Web-app: link]
  
  
• UCCA: A Semantics-based Grammatical Annotation Scheme.
  Omri Abend and Ari Rappoport, IWCS 2013 (full paper).
  [Paper: pdf]
  
  
• Learnability-based Syntactic Annotation Design.
  Roy Schwartz, Omri Abend and Ari Rappoport, COLING 2012 (full paper).
  [Paper: pdf] [Source Code: download]
  
  
• Neutralizing Linguistically Problematic Annotations in Unsupervised Dependency Parsing Evaluation.
  Roy Schwartz, Omri Abend, Roi Reichart and Ari Rappoport, ACL 2011 (full paper).
  [Paper: pdf] [Source Code: download]
  
  
• Improved Unsupervised POS Induction through Prototype Discovery.
  Omri Abend, Roi Reichart and Ari Rappoport, ACL 2010 (full paper).
  [Paper: pdf] [Source Code: download]
  
  
• Fully Unsupervised Core-Adjunct Argument Classification.
  Omri Abend and Ari Rappoport ACL 2010 (full paper).
  [Paper: pdf]
  
  
• Type Level Clustering Evaluation: New Measures and a POS Induction Case Study.
  Roi Reichart^*, Omri Abend^* and Ari Rappoport, CoNLL 2010 (full paper).
  * Both first authors equally contributed to the paper
  [Paper: pdf]
  
  
• Unsupervised Argument Identification for Semantic Role Labeling.
  Omri Abend, Roi Reichart and Ari Rappoport, ACL 2009 (full paper).
  [Paper: pdf]
  
  
• A Supervised Algorithm for Verb Disambiguation into VerbNet Classes.
  Omri Abend, Roi Reichart and Ari Rappoport, COLING 2008 (full paper).
  [Paper: pdf] [Data: upon request]
  
  

Community

I co-organized (with Anna Korhonen, Roi Reichart and Ari Rappoport) two workshops on Unsupervised Learning in NLP. UNSUP 2011 was held as an EMNLP workshop. ROBUS-UNSUP 2012 was held jointly with ROBUS (organized by Chris Biemann and Anders Sogaard) as an EACL workshop.

I was a program committee member in IJCAI 2011, EMNLP 2011, IJCNLP 2011, EMNLP 2012, GSCL 2013 and ACL 2013. I was a also a reviewer for EACL 2009, COLING 2010, ACL 2010, ACL 2011 and EACL 2012.

Teaching

Download

Here you can find the code of the "Prototype Tagger".

And here you can download the code for evaluating your despendency parser using NED.

If you're interested in our dataset from our work on VerbNet classification of verbs, please contact me directly.

Contact Info

Misc

I practice Judo regularly and am a certified Judo guide. From time to time, I also compete. Here is a picture of me with Sensei Murata.

I am also a great fan of desert hiking (Israel has a lot to offer in this respect).

In ACL 2010 held in Uppsala.