Susan Windisch (Brown)

Associate Teaching Professor
Senior Research Associate
Director of CLASIC (Computational Linguistics, Analytics, Search and Informatics)

Susan Windisch is the Director of CLASIC (Computational Linguistics, Analytics, Search and Informatics), the professional M.S. in computational linguistics at the University of Colorado, as well as a Teaching Associate Professor and Senior Research Associate in the Linguistics Department. After receiving a joint Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Linguistics from the University of Colorado in 2010 as Susan Windisch Brown, she worked as a postdoc at the University of Florence before returning to CU in 2014. Her research is in natural language processing, especially event representation, verb polysemy, metaphor, and ontology development. She has been involved in developing several resources for NLP, including VerbNet, the DARPA-Wikidata ontology, OntoNotes and the IMAGACT ontology. Her current research focuses on approaches to event understanding and entity tracking and on the inferential abilities of large language models. She teaches courses in corpus linguistics and natural language processing.

Office: Lucille Berkeley Buchanan (LBB) 122b
Email: susan.brown AT colorado.edu

Teaching

Computational Corpus Linguistics (LING 5200)

Focuses on the use of corpora for linguistic research and natural language processing. Includes an introduction to the Natural Language Toolkit; Python programming for corpus creation and search, including regular expressions; UNIX corpus tools; concordance programs; syntactic treebanks; propbanks; and methods for corpus creation, annotation and validation.

Full Course Description
Fall 2015
Fall 2016
Fall 2017
Fall 2018
Fall 2019
Fall 2020
Fall 2021
Fall 2022
Fall 2023
Fall 2024

CLASIC Capstone (CSCI/LING 5140)

In this capstone to the Computational Linguistics, Analytics, Search and Informatics master's program, students present their internship projects and prepare a paper for submission to a conference. Students will be exposed to industry applications of many of the topics they have covered throughout the program.

Full Course Description
Spring 2019
Spring 2020
Spring 2021
Spring 2022
Spring 2023
Spring 2024

Natural Language Processing (CSCI/LING 5832)

Explores the field of natural language processing as it is concerned with the theoretical and practical issues that arise in getting computers to perform useful and interesting tasks with natural language. Covers the problems of understanding complex language phenomena and building practical programs.

Full Course Description
Spring 2016
Spring 2017

Co-Instructor (University of Colorado)
Spring 2015

CLARA Summer School: Semantic and Multimodal Annotation

The summer school provided training on semantic corpus annotation (sense ambiguity, semantic roles) and on multimodal (verbal and non-verbal) annotation of video-recorded interactions. The aim of the course has been to train young researchers within different areas of semantic and multimodal annotation as well as evaluation methods of these and application of machine learning techniques. The course was given as a mixture of theoretical lectures and hands-on exercises. Participants were trained in both semantic and multimodal annotation schemes; they also got the opportunity to present their own project and to focus on their preferred area of annotation.

Full Course Description

University of Copenhagen
August 2011

NAACL Tutorial: VerbNet

North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) annual
conference, Boulder, Colorado, June 2009

http://clear.colorado.edu/NAACLHLT2009/

Publications & Research

VerbNet Java API

Brown, Susan Windisch. 2024. Extending VerbNet’s verb-specific features to enhance selectional preferences of semantic roles. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations@ LREC-COLING 2024, pp. 124-130.

Tu, Jingxuan, Timothy Obiso, Bingyang Ye, Kyeongmin Rim, Keer Xu, Liulu Yue, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, and James Pustejovsky. 2024. GLAMR: Augmenting AMR with GL-VerbNet event structure. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pp. 7746-7759.

Peck, Luna, and Susan Windisch Brown. 2024. Tool for constructing a large-scale corpus of code comments and other source code annotations. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL)@ LREC-COLING 2024, pp. 18-22.

Elizabeth Spaulding, Kathryn Conger, Anatole Gershman, Mahir Morshed, Susan Windisch Brown, James Pustejovsky, Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Sijia Ge, and Martha Palmer. 2024. PropBank goes public: Incorporation into Wikidata. In Proceedings of The 18th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVIII), pp. 166-175.

Elizabeth Spaulding, Kathryn Conger, Anatole Gershman, Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Susan Windisch Brown, James Pustejovsky, Peter Anick, and Martha Palmer. 2023. The DARPA Wikidata Overlay: Wikidata as an ontology for natural language processing. In Proceedings of the 19th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-19), pp. 1–10, Nancy, France.

Susan Windisch Brown, Julia Bonn, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Annie Zaenen, James Pustejovsky, and Martha Palmer. 2022. Semantic representations for NLP using VerbNet and the generative lexicon. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 5.

Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Martha Palmer, Susan Windisch Brown, and James Pustejovsky. 2022. Componential analysis of English verbs. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 6.

Piyush Mishra, Akanksha Malhotra, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, and Ghazaleh Kazeminejad. 2021. A graphical interface for curating schemas. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pp. 159-166.

Olga Majewska, Charlotte Collins, Simon Baker, Jari Björne, Susan Windisch Brown, Anna Korhonen, and Martha Palmer. 2021. BioVerbNet: A large semantic-syntactic classification of verbs in biomedicine. Journal of Biomedical Semantics 12.

Kevin Stowe, Jenette Preciado, Kathryn Conger, Susan Windisch Brown, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, James Gung, and Martha Palmer. 2021 SemLink 2.0: Chasing lexical resources. In 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS). Online, June 17-18.

Wen, Haoyang, Ying Lin, Tuan M. Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Susan W. Brown et al. 2021. RESIN: A dockerized schema-guided cross-document cross-lingual cross-media information extraction and event tracking system. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Demonstrations (pp. 133-143).

Claire Bonial, Susan W. Brown, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Martha Palmer. 2021. The Rich Event Ontology. In T. Caselli, E. Hovy, M. Palmer & P. Vossen (Eds.), Computational Analysis of Storylines: Making Sense of Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Daniel Peterson, Susan W. Brown, and Martha Palmer. 2020. Verb class induction with partial supervision. The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, New York, February.

Susan Windisch Brown, Julia Bonn, James Gung, Annie Zaenen, James Pustejovsky, and Martha Palmer. 2019. "VerbNet representations: Subevent semantics for transfer verbs." In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Designing Meaning Representations Workshop, 2019, Florence, Italy, August.

Susan Windisch Brown, James Pustejovsky, Annie Zaenen, and Martha Palmer. 2018. "Integrating Generative Lexicon event structures into VerbNet." In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Miyazaki, Japan, May.

Kazeminejad, Ghazaleh, Claire Bonial, Susan Windisch Brown, and Martha Palmer. 2018. automatically extraction qualia relations for the Rich Event Ontology. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 2644-2652.

Susan Windisch Brown, Claire Bonial, Leo Obrst, and Martha Palmer. 2017. The Rich Event Ontology. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Events and Stories in the News Workshop, pp. 87-97. Vancouver, August.

James Pustejovsky, Martha Palmer, Annie Zaenen, and Susan Brown. 2016. "Integrating VerbNet and GL Predicative Structures." Interoperability for Semantic Annotation (ISA) 2016, held in conjunction with LREC 2016, Portoroz, Slovenia. May.

Claire Bonial, David Tahmoush, Susan Windisch Brown, and Martha Palmer. 2016. Multimodal use of an upper-level event ontology. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Events: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation, pp. 18–26, San Diego.

Susan Windisch Brown, Gloria Gagliardi, and Massimo Moneglia. 2014. IMAGACT4ALL: Mapping Spanish Varieties onto a Corpus-Based Ontology of Action. CHIMERA: Romance Corpora and Linguistic Studies 1: 91-135.

Susan Windisch Brown. 2014. From Visual Prototypes of Action to Metaphors: Extending the IMAGACT Ontology of Action to Secondary Meanings. In Proceedings of the Tenth Joint ISO – ACL SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation, Reykjavik, May.

Gloria Gagliardi, Massimo Moneglia, Susan Brown, Francesca Frontini, Fahad Khan, Monica Monachini and Alessandro Panunzi. 2014. The IMAGACT Visual Ontology. An Extendable Multilingual Infrastructure for the representation of lexical encoding of Action. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014), Reykjavik, May.

M. Moneglia, S. W. Brown, A. Kar, A. Kumar, A. K. Ojha, H. Mello, Niharika, G. N. Jha, B. Ray, and A. Sharma. 2014. Mapping Indian Languages onto the IMAGACT Visual Ontology of Action. 2nd Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation . In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014), Reykjavik, May.

Susan Windisch Brown and Martha Palmer. 2012. Semantic annotation of metaphorical verbs with VerbNet. In Proceedings of the Eighth Joint ISO – ACL SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation, Pisa, October.

Susan Windisch Brown, Dmitriy Dligach, and Martha Palmer. 2012. VerbNet class assignment as a WSD task. In Harry Bunt, ed., Computing Meaning, Vol.4. New York: Springer.

Susan Windisch Brown, Dmitriy Dligach, and Martha Palmer. 2011. VerbNet class assignment as a WSD task. Ninth International Conference on Computational Semantics IWCS 2011. Oxford, UK, January.

Claire Bonial, Susan Windisch Brown, William Corvey, Volha Petukhova, Martha Palmer and Harry Bunt. 2011. An exploratory comparison of thematic roles in VerbNet and LIRICS. Proceedings of the Sixth Joint ISO-ACL SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation. Oxford, UK, January.

Claire Bonial, Susan Windisch Brown, Jena D. Hwang, Christopher Parisien, Martha Palmer and Suzanne Stevenson. 2011. Incorporating coercive constructions into a verb lexicon. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT) Workshop on Relational Models of Semantics. Portland, OR, June.

Susan Windisch Brown, Travis Rood, and Martha Palmer. 2010. Number or nuance: Which factors restrict reliable word sense annotation? In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010). Malta, May 2010.

Susan Windisch Brown and Martha Palmer. 2010. What computers need to know about verbs. In Phillip Sheu, Heather Yu, C. V. Ramamoorthy, Arvind K. Joshi, and Lotfi A. Zadeh (eds.), Semantic Computing. IEEE Press/Wiley.

Martha Palmer, Jena D. Hwang, Susan Windisch Brown, Karin Kipper Schuler and Arrick Lanfranchi. 2009. Leveraging lexical resources for the detection of event relations. Proceedings of the AAAI2009 Spring Symposium on Learning by Reading. Stanford, CA, March.

Martha Palmer and Susan Windisch Brown. 2008. The relevance of a cognitive model of the mental lexicon to automatic word sense disambiguation—and vice versa. CoLing 2008: Proceedings of the workshop on human judgments in computational linguistics. Manchester, Association of Computational Linguistics.

Susan Windisch Brown. 2008. Sense distinctions for WSD: Psycholinguistic evidence. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT). Columbus, OH, Association for Computational Linguistics.

Susan Windisch Brown. 2008. Polysemy in the mental lexicon. Colorado Research in Linguistics 21, June.

Les Sikos, Susan Windisch Brown, Albert E. Kim, Laura A. Michaelis, and Martha Palmer. 2008. Figurative language: "Meaning" is often more than just a sum of the parts. In Samsonovich, A. V. (ed.), Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium. AAAI Technical Report FS-08-04. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.

Cecily Jill Duffield, Jena D. Hwang, Susan Windisch Brown, Dmitriy Dligach, Sarah E. Vieweg, Jenny Davis and Martha Palmer. 2007. Criteria for the manual grouping of verb senses. Proceedings of the Linguistic Annotation Workshop, Prague, Association for Computational Linguistics.