Linguistics and Computational Linguistics

Research Program

Brandeis Lab for Linguistics and Computation

The Brandeis Lab for Linguistics and Computation is home to our faculty, researchers, and graduate students. The lab's grant-funded computational and theoretical linguistics and natural language processing research has been at the forefront of the field for decades.

Faculty Research

James Pustejovsky

TJX/Feldberg Professor of Computer Science

Research areas include:

  • Computational linguistics

  • Lexical semantics

  • Generative lexicon theory

  • Qualitative temporal and spatial reasoning

  • TimeML and ISO-Space

  • Machine learning and language annotation

Nianwen Xue

Associate Professor of Linguistics

Research focuses on Chinese linguistic corpora annotated with morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse structures, including:

  • Syntactic Parsing

  • Semantic Parsing

  • Discourse Parsing

  • Chinese Language Processing

Sophia A. Malamud

Associate Professor of Linguistics

Research focuses on the cross-linguistic exploration of semantics and pragmatics, including:

  • The pragmatics of speech acts and the semantics of clause-types

  • Game- and decision-theoretic models of meaning

  • Mood, tense and modality

  • Reference, (in)definiteness, and information structure

  • Collection, annotation, and analysis of spoken corpora

  • The language of immigrant and bilingual communities

Lotus Goldberg

Professor of Linguistics
Computational Linguistics Advising Chair

Research focuses on theoretical generative syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, including:

  • Null anaphora from a cross-linguistic perspective

  • 'Verb-Stranding' and other non-English VP Ellipsis

  • Interactions between morphosyntactic typology and null anaphora traits and diagnostics

  • Modern Hebrew, other Semitic languages, verb-initial languages

  • Corpus linguistics and language annotation

Marc Verhagen

Senior Research Scientist, Computational Linguistics
Lecturer, Linguistics

Research focus includes:

  • Computational linguistics

  • Corpus annotation and machine learning

  • Temporal relation identification