Meaghan Fowlie, PhD

I am an assistant professor at the linguistics department of Universiteit Utrecht in The Netherlands. I teach in the Artificial Intelligence programmes for undergraduate and master's students.

I am an NWO Veni 2019 laureate, meaning I have a 3-year grant from the Dutch government to carry out a research project. The project called Learning meaning from structure, and is about Minimalist neural parsing: fully neural syntax parsers and minimalist-syntax mediated semantic parsers.

My primary research interests lie in connecting mathematical and computational linguistics with mainstream syntax. Mathematical approaches can complement mainstream approaches, for example by identifying the place of human language in the Chomsky hierarchy, and can also clarify existing theories, by forcing their formulation to be completely explicit.

I have a PhD in linguistics from UCLA. My dissertation is about adjunction. I consider how best to model adjuncts in minimalism, what formal properties these models have, and how adjuncts can be learned. In terms of learnability, I consider learnability in the mathematical algorithm sense, as well as taking an experimental approach.