Computational Linguistics & Phonetics Computational Linguistics & Phonetics Fachrichtung 4.7 Universität des Saarlandes
Vera Demberg - Publications

Vera Demberg - Publications


Journal Articles

Examples and specifications that prove a point: Distinguishing between elaborative and argumentative discourse relations.
Merel C. J. Scholman and Vera Demberg.
to appear in Dialogue and Discourse, 2017.

Modeling semantic expectations: Using script knowledge for referent prediction.
Ashutosh Modi, Ivan Titov, Vera Demberg, Asad Sayeed, and Manfred Pinkal.
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2017.

Salience and attention in surprisal-based accounts of language processing
A Zarcone, M van Schijndel, J Vogels, V Demberg
Frontiers in Psychology 7, 844, 2016

The Frequency of Rapid Pupil Dilations as a Measure of Linguistic Processing Difficulty
Vera Demberg and Asad Sayeed, 2016
PLOS ONE

An Exploration of Semantic Features in an Unsupervised Thematic Fit Evaluation Framework
Asad Sayeed, Vera Demberg and Pavel Shkadzko
IJCoL vol. 1: Emerging Topics at the First Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2015

Incremental, Predictive Parsing with Psycholinguistically Motivated Tree-Adjoining Grammar.
Vera Demberg, Frank Keller and Alexander Koller, 2013
In Computational Linguistics, Vol. 39, No. 4, pages 1025--1066

A Strategy for Information Presentation in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Vera Demberg, Andi Winterboer and Johanna D. Moore, 2011
In Computational Linguistics, September 2011, Vol. 37, No. 3: 489-539.

Data from Eye-tracking Corpora as Evidence for Theories of Syntactic Processing Complexity
Vera Demberg and Frank Keller, 2008
In Cognition, Volume 109, Issue 2, pages 193-210
(pre-print)

Peer-reviewed Conference and Workshop Papers

Age differences in language comprehension during driving: Recovery from prediction errors is more effortful for older adults
Katja Häuser, Jutta Kray and Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), London, 2017.

Crowdsourcing discourse interpretations: On the influence of context and the reliability of a connective insertion task.
Merel Scholman and Vera Demberg.
In Proceedings of the Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW), 2017.

A systematic study of neural discourse models for implicit discourse relation.
Attapol T. Rutherford, Vera Demberg, and Nianwen Xue.
In Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2017.

Psycholinguistic models of sentence processing improve sentence readability ranking.
David Howcroft and Vera Demberg.
In Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2017.

On the need of cross validation for discourse relation classification.
Wei Shi and Vera Demberg.
In Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2017.

From openccg to ai planning: Detecting infeasible edges in sentence generation.
M. Schwenger, A. Torralba, J. Hoffmann, D. Howcroft, and V. Demberg.
In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 16), Osaka, Japan, 2016.

Event participant modelling with neural networks.
Ottokar Tilk, Vera Demberg, Asad B. Sayeed, Dietrich Klakow, and Stefan Thater
In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2016, Austin, Texas, USA, November 1-4, 2016, pages 171–182, 2016.

Roleo: Visualising Thematic Fit Spaces on the Web
Asad Sayeed, Xudong Hong and Vera Demberg
Demo Paper at ACL 2016, Berlin, Germany

Thematic fit evaluation: an aspect of selectional preferences
Asad Sayeed, Clayton Greenberg and Vera Demberg
The First Workshop on Evaluating Vector Space Representations for NLP at ACL 2016

But vs. Although under the microscope
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg
Proceedings of CogSci 2016

LingoTurk: managing crowdsourced tasks for psycholinguistics Authors
Florian Pusse, Asad Sayeed and Vera Demberg
Proceedings of NAACL/HLT 2016 Demo Papers, June 2016, San Diego

Improving event prediction by representing script participants
Simon Ahrendt and Vera Demberg
Proceedings of NAACL/HLT 2016, June 2016, San Diego

Annotating Discourse RElations in Spoken Language: A Comparison of the PDTB and CCR Frameworks
Ines Rehbein, Merel Scholman and Vera Demberg
Proceedings of LREC 2016, May 2016, Portoroz

Towards Flexible, Small-Domain Surface Generation: Combining Data-Driven and Grammatical Approaches
Andrea Fischer, Vera Demberg, Dietrich Klakow
Proceedings of the 15th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG), Brighton, September 2015, pp. 105-108

Search Challenges in Natural Language Generation with Complex Optimization Objectives
Vera Demberg, Joerg Hoffmann, David Howcroft, Dietrich Klakow and Alvaro Torralba
in Kuenstliche Intelligenz, Special Issue on Companion Technologies 2015

Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (IDeaL)
Matthew Crocker, Vera Demberg and Elke Teich
in Kuenstliche Intelligenz, Special Issue on Companion Technologies 2015

Vector-space calculation of semantic surprisal for predicting word pronunciation duration
Asad Sayeed, Stefan Fischer and Vera Demberg
in Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2015).

Semantically underinformative utterances trigger pragmatic inferences
Ekaterina Kravtchenko and Vera Demberg
in Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2015.

Verb polysemy and frequency effects in thematic fit modeling
Clayton Greenberg, Vera Demberg and Asad Sayeed
Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics at NAACL, 2015.

Learning to predict script events from domain-specific text
Rachel Rudinger, Vera Demberg, Ashutosh Modi, Benjamin Van Durme and Manfred Pinkal
Proceedings of the fourth joint conference on lexical and computational semantics (*SEM), 2015.

Improving unsupervised vector-space thematic fit evaluation via role-filler prototype clustering.
Clayton Greenberg, Asad Sayeed, and Vera Demberg.
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT), 2015.

Uniform Information Density at the Level of Discourse Relations: Negation Markers and Discourse Connective Omission
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg
in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2015)

Combining unsupervised syntactic and semantic models of thematic fit
Asad Sayeed and Vera Demberg
in Proceedings of the first Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2014)

Incremental Semantic Role Labeling with Tree Adjoining Grammar.
Konstas, Ioannis, Frank Keller, Vera Demberg, and Mirella Lapata.
In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2014. Doha.

Incremental and predictive discourse processing based on causal and concessive discourse markers: ERP studies on German and English
Heiner Drenhaus, Vera Demberg, Judith Koehne and Francesca Delogu
in the Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2014).

Measuring linguistically-induced cognitive load during driving using the ConTRe task
Vera Demberg, Asad Sayeed, Angela Mahr and Christian Müller
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutoUI), Oct 2013, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

The semantic augmentation of a psycholinguistically-motivated syntactic formalism
Asad Sayeed and Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) 2013, Sofia, Bulgaria

On the Information Conveyed by Discourse Markers
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) 2013, Sofia, Bulgaria

Discourse Connectives give rise to lexical predictions
Judith Köhne and Vera Demberg
DETEC workshop 2013, Tübingen, Germany

Language and cognitive load in a dual task environment
Nikolaos Engonopoulos, Asad Sayeed and Vera Demberg
In M. Knauff, M., Pauen, N., Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.) Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society(CogSci 2013, Berlin). Austin TX: Cognitive Science Society.

The Index of Cognitive Activity as a Measure of Linguistic Processing
Vera Demberg and Evangelia Kiagia and Asad Sayeed
In M. Knauff, M., Pauen, N., Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.) Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013, Berlin). Austin TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Pupillometry: the Index of Cognitive Activity in a dual-task study
Vera Demberg
In M. Knauff, M., Pauen, N., Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.) Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013, Berlin). Austin TX: Cognitive Science Society.

The Time-course of Processing Discourse Connectives
Judith Köhne and Vera Demberg
In M. Knauff, M., Pauen, N., Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.) Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013, Berlin). Austin TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Integration Costs on Auxiliaries? -- a self-paced reading study using WebExp
Vera Demberg
In M. Knauff, M., Pauen, N., Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.) Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013, Berlin). Austin TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Identifying Predictive Collocations
Silas Weinbach and Vera Demberg
In M. Knauff, M., Pauen, N., Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.) Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013, Berlin). Austin TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Covert without overt: QR for movementless parsing frameworks
Asad Sayeed and Vera Demberg
GLOW 2013, Lund, Sweden

Measuring the Strength of Linguistic Cues for Discourse Relations
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Advances in Discourse Analysis and its Computational Aspects (ADACA), Mumbai, India, Dec 2012

Implicitness of Discourse Relations
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of COLING 2012, Mumbai, India, Dec 2012 (acc. rate 30%)

Incremental Neo-Davidsonian semantic construction for TAG
Asad B. Sayeed and Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of TAG+11, Paris, France, Sept 2012

Incremental Derivations in CCG
Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of TAG+11, Paris, France, Sept 2012

Syntactic surprisal affects spoken word duration in conversational contexts
Vera Demberg, Asad Sayeed, Philip Gorinski and Nikolaos Engonopoulos
In Proceedings of EMNLP-CoNNL 2012

German and English Treebanks and Lexica for Tree-Adjoining Grammars
Miriam Käshammer and Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, May 2012

Lingistic cognitive load: implications for automotive UIs
Vera Demberg and Asad Sayeed
Workshop on Cognitive Load and In-Vehicle Human-Machine Interaction at AutomotiveUI 2011, Salzburg, Austria, November 2011

Syntactic and Semantic Factors in Processing Difficulty: An Integrated Measure
Jeff Mitchell, Mirella Lapata, Vera Demberg and Frank Keller
In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-10), Uppsala, Sweden, July 2010.

A Computational Model of Prediction in Human Parsing: Unifying Locality and Surprisal Effects
Vera Demberg and Frank Keller
In Proceedings of the 29th meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-09), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 2009.

Correcting the incorrect: Local coherence effects modeled with prior belief update
Klinton Bicknell, Roger Levy and Vera Demberg
In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. pp. 13-24. 2009.

Syntactic Complexity induces Explicit Grounding in the MapTask corpus
Martin Tietze, Vera Demberg and Johanna D. Moore
In Proceedings of the Interspeech 2008, Brisbane, Australia, September 2008.

A Psycholinguistically Motivated Version of TAG
Vera Demberg and Frank Keller, 2008
In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+9 2008), Tuebingen, Germany, June 2008. Slides

Eye-tracking Evidence for Integration Cost Effects in Corpus Data
Vera Demberg and Frank Keller, 2007
In Proceedings of the 29th meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-07), Nashville, Tennessee, US, August 2007.

Phonological Constraints and Morphological Preprocessing for Grapheme-to-phoneme Conversion
Vera Demberg, Helmut Schmid and Gregor Möhler, 2007
In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-07), Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007. Slides

A Language-Independent Unsupervised Model for Morphological Segmentation
Vera Demberg, 2007
In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-07), Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007. Slides

Information Presentation in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Vera Demberg and Johanna D. Moore, 2006
In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (EACL-06), Trento, Italy, April 2006. Slides

Theses

A Broad-Coverage Model of Prediction in Human Sentence Processing
(complete thesis, 12-page precis)
Vera Demberg, 2010
PhD Thesis, The University of Edinburgh.
awarded Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prize 2011
runner-up for 2011 CPHC / BCS Distinguished Dissertations Competition
runner-up for FoLLI E.W. Beth Dissertation Prize 2011

Letter-to-Phoneme Conversion for a German Text-to-Speech System
Vera Demberg, 2006
Diplomarbeit, Stuttgart University.
published as book by Verlag Dr. Müller (VDM), ISBN: 978-3-8364-6428-4 (from Amazon.com)

Information Presentation in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Vera Demberg, 2005
Master's Thesis, The University of Edinburgh.
published as book by Verlag Dr. Müller (VDM), ISBN: 978-3-8364-6536-6 (from Amazon.com)

Peer-reviewed Conference Presentations and Posters

The Role of Adverbial Modification on the Prediction of Upcoming Verbs
Vera Demberg, Evangelia Kiagia and Francesca Delogu
oral presentation at CUNY 2015; USC, Los Angeles, USA

On the predictability of idioms after idiomatic and non-idiomatic contexts: An ERP study
Vera Demberg and Heiner Drenhaus
poster at CUNY 2015; USC, Los Angeles, USA

A discourse connector's distribution determines its interpretation
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg
poster at CUNY 2015; USC, Los Angeles, USA

Underinformative event mentions trigger pragmatic inferences
Ekaterina Kravtchenko and Vera Demberg
poster at CUNY 2015; USC, Los Angeles, USA

“On the one hand†as a Cue to the Comprehension of Discourse Structure
Vera Demberg, Hannah Rohde, Merel Scholman, Chris Cummins, Emily Nicolet
talk at the First Action Conference of the TextLink Cost Initiative "Structuring Discourse in Multilingual Europe" 2015, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

A distributional account of discourse connectives and its effect on fine-grained inferences
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg
poster at the First Action Conference of the TextLink Cost Initiative "Structuring Discourse in Multilingual Europe" 2015, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Discourse annotation via MechanicalTurk
Vera Demberg, Asad Sayeed, Florian Pusse
poster at the First Action Conference of the TextLink Cost Initiative "Structuring Discourse in Multilingual Europe" 2015, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Pupillometry -- the Index of Cognitive Activity as a Measure of Linguistic Processing Difficulty
Vera Demberg, Asad Sayeed, Nikos Engonopoulos and Evangelia Kiagia
oral presentation to be presented at AMLaP 2013, Marseille, France

Incremental and predictive discourse processing based on causal and concessive discourse markers: an ERP study on German
Heiner Drenhaus, Vera Demberg, Judith Köhne and Francesca Delogu
poster to be presented at AMLaP 2013, Marseille, France

Can neighboring relations help to anticipate upcoming discourse relations?
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg
poster to be presented at AMLaP 2013, Marseille, France

Identifying Predictive Collocations
Silas Weinbach and Vera Demberg
poster to be presented at AMLaP 2013, Marseille, France

Discourse expectations and implicitness of (causal) discourse relations
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg
poster presented at AMLaP 2012, Riva del Garda, Italy

Syntactic surprisal affects word durations: Support for UID
Vera Demberg, Asad Sayeed, Philip John Gorinski, and Nikos Engonopoulos
poster presented at AMLaP 2012, Riva del Garda, Italy

Incremental and predictive discourse processing based on causal and concessive discourse markers -- A visual world study (abstract)
Judith Köhne and Vera Demberg
talk (acceptance rate for talks: 8%) presented at CUNY 2012, New York, NY

Integration Costs on Auxiliaries -- a self-paced reading study using WebExp (abstract)
Vera Demberg
poster presented at CUNY 2012, New York, NY

Modelling prediction to estimate human sentence processing difficulty (abstract)
Vera Demberg
talk presented at DGfS AG 11: Information Density and Linguistic Variation, Frankfurt, March 2012

Explaining the Relative Clause Asymmetry (abstract)
Vera Demberg, Frank Keller and Roger Levy
poster presented at CUNY 2011, Stanford, CA

An empirical investigation and new model of local coherences.
Klinton Bicknell, Roger Levy and Vera Demberg.
Oral presentation at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, CA, 8--11 January 2009.

A Theory of Processing Difficulty Based on Syntactic Prediction
Vera Demberg and Frank Keller
poster presented at AMLaP 2008, Cambridge, UK in September 2008

Evidence for the prediction of modifiers during sentence processing
Manabu Arai, Frank Keller and Vera Demberg
poster presented at AMLaP 2008, Cambridge, UK in September 2008

A Theory of Processing Difficulty Based on Syntactic Prediction (abstract)
Vera Demberg and Frank Keller
poster presented at CUNY 2008, Chapel Hill, North Carolina in March 2008

Integrating Surprisal and Dependency Locality Theory: A Broad Coverage Model (abstract)
Vera Demberg and Frank Keller
poster presented at CUNY 2008, Chapel Hill, North Carolina in March 2008

Local coherences in the wild: An eye-tracking corpus study
Klinton Bicknell, Vera Demberg and Roger Levy
poster presented at CUNY 2008, Chapel Hill, North Carolina in March 2008

Do Theories of Syntactic Processing Difficulty scale up to naturally occurring text? (slides)
Vera Demberg and Frank Keller
talk presented at AMLaP 2007, Turku, Finland, on August 25th 2007. Abstract
AMLaP Young Scientist Award for best platform presentation by a junior scientist.

Eye-tracking evidence for frequency and integration cost effects in corpus data (slides)
Vera Demberg, Frank Keller and Roger Levy
talk presented at CUNY 2007, San Diego, CA on March 31st 2007. Abstract