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Dr. Reut Tsarfaty

Hebrew
Dr. Reut Tsarfaty
Contact Info

The Open University The Dorothy De Rothschild Campus Hakikar Building, 294
One University Road P.O.B. 808 Ra’anana 43107, Israel
Office:972-9-7781441 Email:reutts@openu.ac.il

Areas of Interest
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Language Understanding
  • Natural Language Generation
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Machine Learning
  • Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Reut Tsarfaty is a senior lecturer and the head of the Natural Language Processing Lab at the Computer Science Department at the Open University of Israel. Dr. Tsarfaty holds a BSc. from the Technion and MSc./PhD. from the Institute for Logic Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam. She also held postdoctoral research fellowships at Uppsala University in Sweden and at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. Her research focuses on statistical parsing, broadly interpreted to cover morphological, syntactic and semantic parsing ,and their applications, including (but not limited to) natural language programming, automated essay scoring, the analysis and generation of social media content, and more. Current research in Dr. Tsarfaty's lab is kindly funded by an ERC-StG Grant #677352 and an ISF grant #1739/26.

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Jan. 2005–
Mar. 2010
University of Amsterdam | Institute for Logic, Language and Computation
PhD | Awarded on 24/03/2010
Advisors | Prof. Remko Scha, Dr. Khalil Sima’an
Sep. 2003–
Dec. 2004
University of Amsterdam | Institute for Logic, Language and Computation
MSc | Awarded Summa Cum Laude
Advisor | Prof. Michiel Van Lambalgen
Oct. 1998–
Apr. 2002
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology | Faculty of Computer Science
BSc | Awarded Cum Laude
Oct. 2014—
Present
Open University of Israel | Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Senior Lecturer
Feb. 2013–
Present
Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya | Efi Arazi School of Computer Science
Adjunct Lecturer
Jun. 2013–
Sep. 2014
Weizmann Institute | Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science 
Post-Doctorate Research Fellow
Host | Prof. David Harel
Apr. 2010–
Dec. 2012

Uppsala University | Department of Linguistics and Philology
Post-Doctorate Research Fellow
Host | Prof. Joakim Nivre

Jul. 2016-
Jun. 2021
Natural Language Programming: Turning Text into Executable Code
ERC Starting Grant (PI, 1.5M EU)
European Research Council (ERC)
Oct. 2016–
Sep. 2020
Broad-Coverage Cross-Linguistic Semantic Parsing
ISF Individual Grant (PI, 1.5M ILS)
Israel Science Foundation (ISF)
Oct. 2014–
Sep. 2016
Transition-Based Morphosyntactic Parsing for MRLs
Extended Absorption Grant (PI, 100K ILS)
The Open University Research Authority
Jan. 2005-
Jan 2010
Integrated Morphological and Syntactic disambiguation for Modern Hebrew
Mosaic Grant Laureate, full PhD Scholarship (400K EU)
The Dutch Science Foundation (NWO)

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 [PDF] [Software]

Amir More and Reut Tsarfaty. “Data-Driven Morphological Analysis and Disambiguation for Morphologically-Rich Languages and Universal Dependencies”. In: Proceedings of CoLing, December 2016.

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Reut Tsarfaty, Ilia Pogrebezky, Guy Weiss, Yaarit Natan, Smadar Szekely and David Harel. "Semantic Parsing Using Content and Context: A Case Study from Requirements Elicitation ". In: Proceedings of EMNLP, October, 2014.

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Tomer Cagan, Stefan Frank and Reut Tsarfaty. " Generating Subjective Responses to Opinionated Articles in Social Media: An Agenda-Driven Architecture and a Turing-Like Test ". Proceedings of ACL/NLPSD Workshop on NLP and Social Media, July, 2014.

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Djame Seddah, Reut Tsarfaty, Sandra Kuebler et al. "Overview of the SPMRL 2013 Shared Task: Cross-Framework Evaluation of Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages". In: Proceedings of EMNLP/SPMRL, October, 2013.

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Reut Tsarfaty. "A Unified Morpho-Syntactic Scheme of Stanford Dependencies"Proceedings of ACL, August, 2013

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Nathan Schneider and Reut Tsarfaty. " Design Patterns in Fluid Construction Grammars: Book Review". In: Journal of Computational Linguistics (CL), volume 39:(2), The MIT Press, 2013.

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Reut Tsarfaty, Djame Seddah, Sandra Kuebler and Joakim Nivre. "Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages". In: Journal of Computational Linguistics (CL), volume 39:(1), The MIT Press, 2013.

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Reut Tsarfaty, Nivre and Evelina Andersson. "Joint Evaluation for Morphological Segmentation and Syntactic Parsing" In: Proceedings of the International meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL). Jeju, Korea, 2012.

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Reut Tsarfaty, Djame Seddah, Sandra Kuebler and Joakim Nivre. "Cross-Framework Evaluation For Statistical Parsing" In: Proceedings of the International meeting of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (EACL). France, 2012.

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Reut Tsarfaty, Joakim Nivre and Evelina Andersson. "Evaluating Dependency Parsing: Robust and Heuristics-Free Cross-Annotation Evaluation" In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Empirical Methods of Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Edinburgh, Scotland. July 27-29, 2011.

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Reut Tsarfaty. "Relational-Realizational Syntax: An Architecture for Specifying and Statistically Learning Morphosyntactic Descriptions". In: Proceedings of the 15th International LFG Conference (LFG10). CSLI Publications, 2010.

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Reut Tsarfaty, Djame Seddah, Yoav Goldberg, Sandra Kuebler, Marie Candito, Jennifer Foster, Yannick Versley, Ines Rehbein and Lamia Tounsi "Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages (SPMRL): What, How and Whither". In: Proceedings of the first workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages (SPMRL) at NA-ACL. Los Angeles, CA, USA, June 6, 2010.

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Reut Tsarfaty and Khalil Sima'an. "Modeling Morphosyntactic Agreement for Constituency-Based Parsing of Modern Hebrew". In: Proceedings of the first workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages (SPMRL) at NA-ACL. Los Angeles, CA, USA, June 6, 2010.

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Reut Tsarfaty, Khalil Sima'an and Remko Scha. "An Alternative to Head-Driven Approaches for Parsing a (Relatively) Free Word-Order Language". In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Singapore, August 6--7, 2009.

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Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty, Meni Adler and Michael Elhadad. "Enhancing Unlexicalized Parsing Performance using a Wide Coverage Lexicon, Fuzzy Tag-set Mapping, and EM-HMM-based Lexical Probabilities". Proceedings of the 12th Meeting of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL). Athens, Greece, 30 March--3 April 2009.

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Reut Tsarfaty and Khalil Sima'an. "Relational-Realizational Parsing". Proceedings of The 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (CoLing). Manchester, UK, August 18--22, 2008.

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Yoav Goldberg and Reut Tsarfaty. "A Single Generative Model for Joint Morphological Segmentation and Syntactic Parsing". Proceedings of ACL-HLT 2008, Colombus, Ohio, USA. June 16--18, 2008.

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Reut Tsarfaty and Yoav Goldberg. "Word-Based or Morpheme-Based? Annotation Strategies for Modern Hebrew Clitics". Proceedings of LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco, May 28--30, 2008.

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Reut Tsarfaty and Khalil Sima'an. "Accurate Unlexicalized Parsing for Modern Hebrew". Text, Speech and Dialog (TSD). Pilsen, Czech Republic, September 2007. Proceedings of TSD, Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, Springer-Verlag 

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Reut Tsarfaty and Khalil Sima'an. "Three-Dimensional Parametrization for Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages". To appear in Proceedings of the International Conference on Parsing Technologies (IWPT). Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007.

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Reut Tsarfaty. "The Interplay of Syntax and Morphology in Building Parsing Models for Modern Hebrew". In Janneke Huitink and Sophia Katrenko (eds.) Proceedings of ESSLLI Student Session 2006, Malaga, Spain, August 2006. (Springer Best Paper Award)

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Reut Tsarfaty. "Integrated Morphological and Syntactic Disambiguation for Modern Hebrew", In Proceedings of CoLing/ACL SRW 2006, Sydney, Australia, July 2006. (ACL SRW panelists: Shuly Wintner, Kemal Oflazer)

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Reut Tsarfaty. "Participants in Action: Aspectual Meanings and Thematic Relations Interplay in the Semantics of Semitic Morphology". In Henk Zeevat and Balder Ten cate (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, Batumi, Georgia. To Appear.

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Reut Tsarfaty. "Connecting Causative Constructions and Aspectual Meanings: A Case Study from Semitic Derivational Morphology". In Paul Dekker and Michael Franke (eds.) Proceedings of the Fifteenth Amsterdam Colloquium, ILLC/Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. December 2005.

Reut Tsarfaty. "Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages". Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, Morgan and Claypool Publishers. (Under development. For a proof copy please email me.)

Reut Tsarfaty. "Relational-Realizational Parsing". PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam. ILLC Dissertation Series DS-2010-01 ISBN:978-90-5776-205-5 (Available online from the ILLC archive. For a hard copy please email me.)

Reut Tsarfaty. "Syntax and Parsing of Semitic Languages". In: Imed Zitouni (ed), Semitic Languages Processing, Springer, Forthcoming.

[slides]

Reut Tsarfaty, "Relational-Realizational Syntax: An Architecture for Specifying and Learning Morphosyntactic Descriptions", The International Meeting on Lexical-Functional Grammar, (LFG'10), Ottawa, Canada. June 18-20, 2010.

Reut Tsarfaty and Khalil Sima'an "Dimensions of Parametrization for Modern Hebrew Statistical Parsing", The Israeli Seminar for Computational Linguistics (ISCOL), Ramat Gan, Israel. June 20, 2007.

Reut Tsarfaty and Khalil Sima'an "Modern Hebrew Statistical Parsing: Models and Challenges", The Israeli Seminar for Computational Linguistics (ISCOL), Haifa, Israel. June 29, 2006.

Reut Tsarfaty and Khalil Sima'an "Baseline Models for Modern Hebrew Parsing", Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands (CLiN), Amsterdam, The Netherlands. December 16, 2005.

Reut Tsarfaty. "Connecting Causative Constructions and Aspectual Meanings: A case study from Semitic Derivational Morphology". Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. December 19, 2005.

Reut Tsarfaty. "Participants in Action: Aspectual Meanings and Thematic Relations Interplay in the Semantics of Semitic Morphology". Sixth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, Batumi, Georgia. September 12--16, 2005.

Reut Tsarfaty. "Aspectual Choice in Modern Hebrew''. Workshop: The Roots of Pragmasemantics. Szklarska Poreba, Polland. February 26 -- March 1, 2005.

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Yoav Goldberg and Reut Tsarfaty. "A Single Generative Model for Joint Morphological Segmentation and Syntactic Parsing". ACL-HLT 2008, Colombus, Ohio, USA. June 16--18, 2008.

Reut Tsarfaty and Yoav Goldberg. "Word-Based or Morpheme-Based? Annotation Strategies for Modern Hebrew Clitics". LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco, May 28--30, 2008.

Reut Tsarfaty. "Constructing Meanings: A Cognitive Approach to the Semantics of Semitic Morphology". Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), Ghent, Belgium. September 7, 2005.

"Parsing with Paradigms: A Relational-Realizational Architecture for Specifying and Statistically Learning Morphosyntactic Descriptions". In: Quantitative Measures in Morphology and Morphological Development Workshop, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA. January 15-16, 2011.

"Relations and Realization in Syntax and Parsing". Columbia University. June 16, 2010.  [slides]

"Morphology in Parsing: A Taxonomy-Based Approach". NL Seminar series, Information Sciences Institute at USC. June 8, 2010

"Statistical Parsing for Morphologically Rich Languages: A Gentle Introduction". The First Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages, June 5, 2010.  [slides]

"Between Typology and Technology: A Relational-Realizational Model for Parsing Rich Morphosyntax". Language and Computation Seminar, The Linguistics Department at Amherst UMass. January 26, 2010.

"How to and Not to Parse Nonconfigurational Phenomena". Panel on Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages, The International Conference on Parsing Technology (IWPT). October 8, 2009.

"Linguistic Typology and Language Technology: A Match Made in Statistical Parsing". Séminaire de l'école doctorale de Paris 7. October 5, 2009.

"Linguists, Spies and Dangerous Things". ILLC Open House and Alumni event. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. December 19, 2009.

"Probabilstic Modeling for Morphologically Rich Languages: A case study from Modern Hebrew". Paris Amsterdam Logic Meeting for Young Researchers (PALMYR). Paris, France, June 1--2, 2007. 

"Morphological Templates and Aspectual Meanings in Modern Hebrew". Linguistics Departmental Seminar, The Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. January 3, 2006.

"Aspectual Semantics of Morphological Templates in Modern Hebrew". Logic Tea, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. May 10, 2005.

Reut Tsarfaty. " Investigation of Aspect Semantics in Modern Hebrew" MSc. thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2005.

[link]

Reut Tsarfaty, Djame Seddah, Sandra Kuebler and Joakim Nivre. "Special Issue on Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages". Journal of Computational Linguistics (CL), volume 39:(1), The MIT Press, 2013.

[link]

Marianna Apidiansky, Ido Dagan, Jennifer Foster, Yuval Marton, Djame Seddah, Reut Tsarfaty. "Joint Workshop on Statistical Parsing and Semantic Processing of Morphologically Rich Languages". Proceedings of a meeting to be held at the 50th of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2012.

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Djame Seddah, Reut Tsarfaty, Sandra Kuebler. "Second Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages". Proceedings of a meeting held at the 12th International Conference on Parsing Technologies (IWPT), The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2011.

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Djame Seddah, Reut Tsarfaty, Jennifer Foster. "First Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages". Proceedings of a meeting held at the 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NA-ACL), The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2010.

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2015–2020: Natural Language Programming: Turning Text into Executable Code. (Funded by ERC-StG grant 2015) In this project we view the programming task as automatically generating a system based on a verbal description of its behavior. Our task is to parse natural language requirements into code, using advanced statistical models for structure prediction.

2015–2019: Automatic Broad-Coverage Cross-Linguistics Semantic Parsing (Funded by an ISF individual research grant 2015). In this project we develop statistical models for acquiring a CCG-based semantic representation enhanced to accommodate morphological, morphosyntactic and morphosemantic phenomena.

2017-present: Neural Sentiment Analysis in Modern Hebrew (with Dr. Anat Ben David, MSc. Student Adam Amran, from the Open University Media Lab)

2014-present: Opinionated Natural Language Generation in Social Media (with Tomer Cagan,  Dr. Stefan Frank)

2013-present: Universal Dependencies for Modern Hebrew (with Dr. Yoav Goldberg, Amir More)

2010–2013: Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages. (with Dr. Djame Saddeh, Prof. Sandra Kubler, Prof. Joakim Nivre). Most NLP models are developed with English in mind. What happens when applying them to a different language? In this project we investigate, develop and evaluate resources and models for parsing morphologically rich languages (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish and more, which are known to be notoriously hard to parse), thus significantly broadening the empirical reach of statistical parsers.

2010–2013: Evaluation Algorithms for Structure Prediction (postdoc project. Host: Prof. Joakim Nivre) Statistical NLP systems predict complex graph structures that represent different notions of meaning. How can we quantitatively evaluate the correctness of these structures? How can we faithfully compare the resulting structures across frameworks? In this project we develop distance-based algorithms that solve complex evaluation tasks.

2006–2010: Joint Morphological-Syntactic Parsing (PhD project. Advisors: Prof. Remko Scha, Prof. Khalil Simaan). Standard approaches to NLP separate word-level (morphology) and sentence-level (syntax) processing. There is ample evidence that this separation is empirically problematic. In this project we develop statistical morphosyntactic parsing architectures (lattice parsing, RR parsing) and show their superiority with respect to standard pipeline NLP approaches.

2004–2005: Formal Semantics of Tense and Aspect (MSc project. Advisor: Prof. Michiel van Lambalgen). In this project we view the Semitic morphological templates (‘binyanim’) as formal semantic operators, and develop a formal logic that allows us to calculate the aspectual meaning of verbs by applying the operator realized by the template to the verbal class of the root. The project involved empirical evaluation in the realm of language acquisition (ages 3-30).

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  • 2015--2017: Introduction to Natural Language Processing
                         (Remote Course, Written/Online Materials)
                         Open University of Israel
  • 2017-2018:  Neural Network Methods in Natural Language Processing
                        (Frontal Lectures, Advanced MSc. Seminar)
                        Open University of Israel
  • Spring 2015: Introduction to Natural Language Processing
                         Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC), Israel
  • Spring 2013: Introduction to Natural Language Processing
                          Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC), Israel
  • Summer 2013: Parsing Morphologically Rich Languages
                             European Summer School for Logic Language and Information (ESSLLI)
  • Fall 2011: Introduction to Natural Language Processing
                     (Lecturers: Mats Dahllof, Joakim Gustafson, Marco Kuhlmann,
                     Joakim Nivre, Magnus Sahlgren, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty)
                     Uppsala University, Sweden
  • Spring 2008: Formal Approaches to Grammar
                          University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Amir More (IDC)
Transition-Based Morphosyntactic Parsing

Dr. Yoav Goldberg, Bar Ilan University

We are constantly seeking excellent MSc., PhD, and Postdoc candidates interested in working on foundational and applied research in the area of Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing (CL/NLP). For particularly suitable candidates full or partial funding may be available.
            If you are wish to be considered, please contact me via email, attaching
Your CV and publications list
1-2 pages Research Statement / Statement of Research Interest
The Names and Contact information of 3 professional references
Links to any (relevant) open source projects (via github, bitbucket, etc)
          It is highly recommended to go over the publications and project pages on this websie.
          This call is relevant for students from all Israeli Universities.