Katya Alahverdzhieva

/ə'lahvɛrdʒievə/

Katya Alahverdzhieva 
PhD Student
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation 
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
email:   K.<mylastname> (at) sms.ed.ac.uk
address: Informatics Forum
         10 Crichton Street
         Edinburgh EH8 9AB
         Scotland, UK
phone:   +44-131-650-4449 (office) 
office:  3.25

Events

Together with Gianluca Giorgolo (Carleton University), we organised a workshop on Formal and Computational Approaches to Multimodal Communication. The workshop was held under the auspices of ESSLLI 2012 and it tooks place in Opole, Poland from 6 August to 10 August.

More information can be found here.

Research

I am in my final year of my PhD studies at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC), University of Edinburgh working on a grammar of speech and co-speech gesture under the supervision of Professor Alex Lascarides. My research concerns the formal modelling of spontaneous co-speech gesture in constraint-based grammars, and their interaction with the prosody, syntax and semantics of speech.

Prior to that, I obtained an M.Sc. from University of Nancy 2, France, and University of Saarland, Germany. My Master's thesis involved implementation of a Tree-Adjoining Grammar for English using meta-level description language. My supervisor in Nancy was Claire Gardent, and my supervisor in Saarbrücken was Tania Avgustinova. I obtained a Bachelor's Degree in Linguistics and Literature in my home town at Sofia Univerisity, Bulgaria.

Research Interests

My main interests include but are not restricted to the following areas:

  • Formal Grammar Theories (TAG, HPSG, LFG)
  • Syntax-Semantics Interface
  • Prosody-Syntax Interface
  • Multimodal Interaction
  • Co-verbal Communication
  • Corpus Linguistics

    • Publications

  • Alahverdzhieva, K., D. Flickinger and A. Lascarides [2012]. Multimodal Grammar Implementation, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT) 2012, Montreal, Canada.
    [pdf]
  • Alahverdzhieva, K. and A. Lascarides [2011]. Semantic Composition of Multimodal Actions in Constraint-based Grammars, Proceedings of Constraints in Discourse (CID) 2011, Agay-Roches Rouges, Var, France.
    [pdf]
  • Alahverdzhieva, K. and A. Lascarides [2011]. An HPSG Approach to Synchronous Speech and Deixis, in Stefan Muller (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), pp6--24, Seattle, USA.
    [pdf] [bib]
  • Alahverdzhieva, K. and A. Lascarides [2011]. Integration of Speech and Deictic Gesture in a Multimodal Grammar, Actes de Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN), Montpellier, France.
    [pdf] [bib]
  • Alahverdzhieva, K. and A. Lascarides [2010]. A Grammar for Language and Co-verbal Gesture, Proceedings of the 4th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS), Frankfurt, Oder, Germany.
    [pdf]
  • Alahverdzhieva, K. and A. Lascarides [2010]. Analysing Speech and Co-speech Gesture in Constraint-based Grammars, in Stefan Muller (ed.), Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Head-Driven Phase Structure Grammar (HPSG), pp5--25, Paris.
    [pdf] [bib]

    • Theses

  • Alahverdzhieva, K. [2008] XTAG using XMG. A Core Tree-Adjoining Grammar for English, unpublished Master's thesis, Universität des Saarlandes, Germany and Université Nancy 2, France.
    [pdf-sb] [pdf-nancy] [grammar documentation] [grammar files]
  • PhD thesis: under construction

    • Awards

  • Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Fellow, M.Sc. Studentiship, 2006-2008
  • Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRS) Ph.D. studentship, 2008-2011
  • Socrates/Erasmus Scholarship, 2003-2004

    • Non-Academic

    When not investigating gestures, I am most probably running in the Meadows, baking a new dessert, or attending a language class spending time with my kid.

    Since 8 July 2011, I am officially known as Katya Saint-Amand.

    created 28/11/2010, last modified 16/05/2012