Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS)
3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215 573-6284

chenmain at seas dot upenn dot edu

I am curious about many things, but I am most interested in the properties of grammar formalisms that have been proposed to model natural language syntax and phonology. I like looking into the range of patterns predicted to be possible by a formalism and understanding which parts of the formal machinery account for which parts of observed linguistic phenomena. Currently, I work mostly within Tree Adjoining Grammar and related approaches, but I also intend to keep an eye on developments in Optimality Theory. Some additional interests include language acquisition, Mandarin linguistics, and bilingualism.

I have just finished a postdoc at IRCS under the supervision of Aravind Joshi. While at Penn, I spent most of my time thinking about dependency grammars and extensions of TAG, such as multi-component TAG and TAG with flexible composition.
If you'd like to know more about grammars for dependency structures, I'd recommend looking at Marco Kulhman's work. The slides from his dissertation are very helpful.
For more on flexible composition, a sort of type-raising in TAG, try taking a look at some papers by Maribel Romero, Laura Kallmeyer, and Dr. Joshi, such as Flexible Composition in LTAG: Quantifer Scope and Inverse Linking.

On the Generation and Linearization of Multi-Dominance Structures

I did my graduate studies in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Bob Frank supervised my dissertation, which explores syntactic representations that allow nodes with multiple parents. That is, syntactic representations include non-tree graphs.
If you're curious, you can read the abstract or you can take a look by clicking on the title above.

Some papers, handouts, and slides will soon be available here.
In addition to the topics I mention above, these include work on Targeted Constraint Optimality Theory, Mandarin imperatives, acquisition of Mandarin, and finite state Optimality Theory.