Curriculum Vitae

Nurit Melnik

nurit@eyron.com

Research Interests

Syntax, Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)

Education

1997-2002          University of California at Berkeley, Department of Linguistics

Ph.D. in Linguistics, 2002

Dissertation: "Verb-Initial Constructions in Modern Hebrew"

Committee: Andreas Kathol (chair), Paul Kay, Johanna Nichols

M.A. in Linguistics, 1999

1989-1996          The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Studies towards an M.A. in an Individual Graduate Program in Cognitive Studies (ABD)

B.Sc. in Computer Science and in General Studies in the Humanities, 1993

Professional Experience

2005-present     Lecturer in the English Department and the M.Ed. program in Foreign Language Teaching at Oranim Academic College of Education

2006                   Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Language at the University of Haifa

2003-2007          Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Haifa
Sponsor: Shuly Wintner

2003-2004          Project Coordinator
Project: Developing a gesture-speech language for a virtual reality environment (MAFAT)

2001                   Graduate Student Instructor at UC Berkeley

1999                   Graduate Student Instructor at UC Berkeley

1993-1997          Systems analyst at Eyron Computerized Information Systems Ltd.

1993                   Computer programmer at Amdocs (Israel) Ltd.

1984-1986          Military service in the Intelligence; involved computerized language processing in Arabic

Grants and Fellowships

2003-2007          Post-doctoral fellowship, Israel Science Foundation and the Caesarea Edmond Benjamin Rothschild Foundation Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of Computer Science

2001-2002          Dean's Normative Time Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley

1997-2002          Block grants, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley

Publications

Melnik, Nurit. 2007. "From 'hand-written' to computationally implemented HPSG theories". Research on Language and Computation 5.2:199-236, June 2007.

Melnik, Nurit. 2007. " Extending partial pro-drop in Modern Hebrew: A comprehensive analysis". In Stefan Müller, ed., Proceedings of the 2007 HPSG Conference, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Melnik, Nurit. 2006. "A constructional approach to verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew". Cognitive Linguistics 17.2:153-198.

Melnik, Nurit. 2006. "Hybrid agreement as a conflict resolution strategy". In Stefan Müller, ed., Proceedings of the 2006 HPSG Conference, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Melnik, Nurit. 2005. "From 'hand-written' to implemented HPSG theories". In Stefan Müller, ed., Proceedings of the 2005 HPSG Conference, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Melnik, Nurit. 1997. "The sound system of Lai". Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 20.2:9-21.

Melnik, Nurit. 1997. "Verbal alternations in Lai". Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 20.2:151-160.

Presentations

2006                   "Improving statistical machine translation by means of transfer rules" presented at the Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation on Large-scale Grammar Development and Grammar Engineering, Haifa, Israel.

2006                   "Hybrid agreement as a conflict resolution strategy" presented at the 13th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Varna, Bulgaria.

2005                   "From 'hand-written' to computationally implemented HPSG theories" presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Constraint-Based Grammar, Bremen, Germany and at the 12th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lisbon, Portugal.

2004                   "A constructional approach to inverted constructions in Modern Hebrew" presented at the Third International Conference on Construction Grammar, Marseille, France.

2004                   "A constructional HPSG analysis of inversion in Modern Hebrew" presented at the colloquia of the Department of English at Bar Ilan University and the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University.

2003                   "The licensing conditions of verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew" presented at the colloquia of the Departments of English at Haifa University and the Hebrew University.

2002                   "The licensing conditions of free inversion in Modern Hebrew" presented at the Stanford Syntax Workshop.

1999                   "A multiple-inheritance hierarchical representation of Hebrew Adjectives of Enablement" presented at the Workshop on Semitic Morphology at the LSA Summer Institute in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Teaching Experience

Oranim Academic College of Education

In a Word: Issues in Lexical Semantics (Spring '07; M.Ed.)

Linguistic Corpora (Spring '06 & Fall '07; M.Ed.)

The Notion of 'Subject' in Hebrew, Arabic, and English (Fall 05; M.Ed.)

Syntax and Contrastive Analysis (2005-6 & 2006-7; B.A.)

Internet Resources for Learning & Teaching English (2006-7; B.A.)

Advisor to Abeer Kassem (M.Ed. thesis, completion expected 05/2007)

Advisor to Jinan Zoabi (M.Ed. thesis, completion expected 01/2008)

Haifa University

Introduction to Hebrew Computational Linguistics (Spring '06; B.A.)

UC Berkeley

Introduction to Syntax and Semantics (Spring '01; Graduate Student Instructor)

Introduction to Linguistics (Spring '99; Graduate Student Instructor)

Academic Service

Program Committee Member

IATL (2005, 2006)

Reviewer for Conferences

IATL (2005-7), HPSG (2005)

Thesis Committee Member

Computer Science Department at the University of Haifa
Shlomo Yona (M.Sc. Thesis, 2005) & Dan Shacham (M.Sc. Thesis, 2007)

Languages

Hebrew (native), English (near native), some Standard Arabic and Spanish

References: upon request