Mark A. Finlayson

I am an Assistant Professor at FIU's School of Computing and Information Sciences.

Email:		markaf@fiu.edu
Phone:		+1 (305) 348-7988
Fax:		+1 (305) 348-3549
Mail:		11200 S.W. 8th Street ECS Building Room 362 Miami, FL 33199

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Research Interests

I study the science of narrative, including understanding the relationship between narrative, cognition, and culture, developing new methods and techniques for investigating questions related to language and narrative, and endowing machines with the ability to understand and use narratives for a variety of applications. Key problems I have addressed so far include: extracting high-level narrative structure from sets of stories [,J4]; natural language processing [W4,W5,W9]; building comprehensive tools for corpus annotation [W1,W7]; and collecting richly annotated corpora of stories [C2,C3,J3]. My research intersects computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science [C1,O3], and the digital humanities.

Brief Bio

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2012 under the supervision of Professor Patrick H. Winston. Following that, I was a Research Scientist in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for 2½ years. I received my S.M. in 2001 from MIT, and the B.S. in 1998 from the University of Michigan, both in Electrical Engineering. I am co-founder and general chair of the Computational Models of Narrative Workshop series.

Courses

Spring 2017:		CAP 5640/CAP 4641/LIN 5934: Introduction to Natural Language Processing
Spring 2017:		COT 3993: Discrete Structures
Fall 2016:		CAP 5602: Graduate Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Spring 2016:		CAP 5993/CAP 4993: Introduction to Natural Language Processing
Fall 2015:		CAP 5602: Graduate Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Spring 2015:		CIS 6930: Advanced Special Topics: Natural Language Processing

All Citable Works

1. Journal Articles

[J4] Finlayson, M. A. (2016) Inferring Propp’s Functions from Semantically Annotated Text. Journal of American Folklore, 129(511) 53-75.

[J3] Finlayson, M. A. (2015) ProppLearner: Deeply Annotating a Corpus of Russian Folktales to Enable the Machine Learning of a Russian Formalist Theory. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH), doi:10.1093/llc/fqv067

[J2] Finlayson, Mark A. & Corman, Steven R. (2013) The Military Interest in Narrative. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung (International Journal for Language Data Processing), 37(1-2) 173-191. (web)

[J1] Finlayson, Mark A. (2013) A Survey of Corpora in Computational and Cognitive Narrative Science. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung (International Journal for Language Data Processing), 37(1-2) 113-141. (web, supplementary material)

2. Main Conferences

[C3] Finlayson, M. A., Halverson, J. R., & Corman, S. R. (2014) The N2 Corpus: A Semantically Annotated Collection of Islamist Extremist Stories. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014), Reykjavik, Iceland. 896–902.

[C2] Hervás, R., & Finlayson, M. A. (2010) The Prevalence of Descriptive Referring Expressions in News and Narrative. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2010), Uppsala, Sweden. 49–54.

[C1] Finlayson, M. A., & Winston, P. H. (2005) Intermediate Features and Informational-level Constraint on Analogical Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2005), Stresa, Italy. 666–671.

4. Minor Conferences, Workshops, & Symposia

[W13] Eisenberg, J. D. & Finlayson, M. A. (2016) Automatic Identification of Narrative Diegesis and Point of View. In The 2nd Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNS 2016), Austin, TX. 36-46. (code)

[W12] Yarlott, W. V. H. & Finlayson, M. A. (2016) ProppML: A Complete Annotation Scheme for Proppian Morphologies. In The 7th International Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN'16), Krakow, Poland. 8:1-8:19. doi:10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2016.8

[W11] Yarlott, W. V. H. & Finlayson, M. A. (2016) Learning a Better Motif Index: Toward Automated Motif Extraction. In The 7th International Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN'16), Krakow, Poland. 7:1-7:10. doi:10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2016.7

[W10] Eisenberg, J. D., Yarlott, W. V. H., & Finlayson, M. A. (2016) Comparing Extant Story Classifiers: Results & New Directions. In The 7th International Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN'16), Krakow, Poland. 6:1-6:10. doi:10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2016.6

[W9] Finlayson, M. A. (2014) Java Libraries for Accessing the Princeton Wordnet: Comparison and Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 7th International Global WordNet Conference (GWC 2014), Tartu, Estonia. 78–85. Tool download [P5].

[W8] Asgari, E., Ghassemi, M., & Finlayson, M. A. (2013) Confirming the themes and interpretive unity of Ghazal poetry using topic models. In Proceedings of the NIPS Workshop on Topic Models: Computation, Application, and Evaluation, Lake Tahoe, NV. Submission 18.

[W7] Finlayson, M. A. (2011) The Story Workbench: An Extensible Semi-Automatic Text Annotation Tool. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT4), Stanford, CA. 21–24. Tool download [P4].

[W6] Finlayson, M. A. (2011) Corpus Annotation in Service of Intelligent Narrative Technologies. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT4), Stanford, CA. 17–20.

[W5] Kulkarni, N., & Finlayson, M. A. (2011) jMWE: A Java Toolkit for Detecting Multi-Word Expressions. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from Parsing and Generation to the Real World (MWE 2011), Portland, OR. 122–124. (code)

[W4] Finlayson, M. A., & Kulkarni, N. (2011) Detecting Multi-Word Expressions improves Word Sense Disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from Parsing and Generation to the Real World (MWE 2011), Portland, OR. 20–24. (code)

[W3] Finlayson, M. A. (2010) Learning Narrative Morphologies from Annotated Folktales. In Proceedings of the 1st Automated Motif Discovery in Cultural Heritage and Scientific Communication Texts Workshop (AMICUS), Vienna, Austria. 99–102.

[W2] Finlayson, M. A. (2009) Deriving Narrative Morphologies via Analogical Story Merging. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Analogy (published as “New Frontiers in Analogy Research”, New Bulgarian University Press), Sofia, Bulgaria. 127–136.

[W1] Finlayson, M. A. (2008) Collecting Semantics in the Wild: The Story Workbench. In Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Naturally Inspired Artificial Intelligence (Published as Technical Report FS-08-06, Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA), Arlington, VA. 46–53.

3. Book Chapters & Invited Articles

[B2] Finlayson, M. A. & Erjavec, T. (2017, in press) Overview of Annotation Creation: Processes & Tools. In Handbook of Linguistic Annotation, edited by N. Ide and J. Pustejovsky. Springer. arXiv:1602.05753

[B1] Finlayson, M. A. (2012) Sets of Signals, Information Flow, and Folktales. In Proceedings of the Turing Centenary Conference and 8th Conference on Computability in Europe (CiE 2012), (Published as "How the World Computes", Lecture Notes in Computer Science [LNCS] No. 7318, Springer-Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg), Cambridge, UK. 228–236. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-30870-3_23

5. Software & Corpora

[P7] Finlayson, M. A., Halverson, J. R., & Corman, S. R. (2014) The Narrative Networks Corpus: A Semantically Annotated Collection of Islamist Extremist Stories (N2 Corpus). MIT CSAIL Work Product. hdl:1721.1/57507. Described in [C3]

[P6] Finlayson, M. A. (2013) jVerbnet: A Java Library for Interfacing with Verbnet.

[P5] Finlayson, M. A. (2013) JWI: The MIT Java Interface to Wordnet. Described in [W9].

[P4] Finlayson, M. A. (2013) The Story Workbench: A General Purpose Text Annotation Tool. Described in [W1,W6].

[P3] Finlayson, M. A. (2011). jSemcor: A Java Library for Interfacing with Semcor.

[P2] Finlayson, M. A., & Kulkarni, N. (2011) jMWE: A Java Library for Detecting Multi-Word Expressions. Described in [W4,W5].

[P1] Finlayson, M.A. & Hervás, R. (2010) UCM/MIT Indications, Referring Expressions, and Co-Reference Corpus (UMIREC corpus). MIT CSAIL Work Product. hdl:1721.1/57507 Described in [C2]. Annotation Guide at [O5].

6. Other Works

[O10] Finlayson, M. A. (2016) Report on the 2015 NSF Workshop on Unified Annotation Tooling. MIT CSAIL Technical Report No. MIT-CSAIL-TR-2016-014. hdl:1721.1/105270

[O9] Finlayson, M. A. (2013) Book Review: Computational Modeling of Narrative, by Inderjeet Mani. Natural Language Engineering, 20(2), 289–292. doi:10.1017/S135132491300017X

[O8] Finlayson, M. A. (2012) Learning Narrative Structure from Annotated Folktales. Doctoral Dissertation. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/71284

[O7] Finlayson, M. A. (2011) Reports of the AAAI 2010 Fall Symposia: Computational Models of Narrative. AI Magazine, 32(1), 96–97. doi:10.1609/aimag.v32i1.2338

[O6] Finlayson, M. A., Richards W., & Winston, P. H. (2010) Computational Models of Narrative: Review of the Workshop. AI Magazine, 31(2), 97–100. doi:10.1609/aimag.v31i2.2295

[O5] Finlayson, M. A., & Hervás, R. (2010) Annotation Guide for the UCM/MIT Indications, Referential Expressions, and Coreference Corpus (UMIREC Corpus). MIT CSAIL Technical Report No. MIT-CSAIL-TR-2010-025. hdl:1721.1/54765

[O4] Richards, W., Finlayson, M. A., & Winston, P. H. (2009) Advancing Computational Models of Narrative. MIT CSAIL Technical Report No. MIT-CSAIL-TR-2009-063. hdl:1721.1/50232

[O3] Finlayson, M. A., & Winston, P. H. (2006) Analogical Retrieval via Intermediate Features: The Goldilocks Hypothesis. MIT CSAIL Technical Report No. MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-071:. hdl:1721.1/34635

[O2] Finlayson, M. A. (2001) Development of a Scintillating Reference Grid for Spatial-Phase-Locked Electron-Beam Lithography. Master of Science Dissertation. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/16793

[O1] Hastings, J. T., Zhang, F., Finlayson, M. A., Goodberlet, J. G., & Smith, H. I. (2000) Two-dimensional spatial-phase-locked electron-beam lithography via sparse sampling. Journal of Vaccum Science and Technology B, 18(6), 3268–3271.

7. Citable Abstracts

[A9] Sack, G.A., Finlayson, M.A., Gervás, P. (2014) Computational Models of Narrative: Using Artificial Intelligence to Operationalize Russian Formalist and French Structuralist Theories, Digital Humanities 2014 (DH), Lausanne, Switzerland.

[A8] Finlayson, M.A. & Winston, P.H. (2011) Narrative is a Key Cognitive Competency, in Proceedings of the 2nd Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA 2011), Arlington, VA.

[A7] Kraemer, J., Finlayson, M.A. Ichinco, D. & Gibson, E. (2008) Advances in Discourse: Theory and Annotation, in Proceedings of the Conference on Processing Text-technological Resources (PTTR), Bielefeld, Germany.

[A6] Finlayson, M.A. & Winston, P.H. (2007) Reasoning by Imagining: The Neo-Bridge System, in the MIT CSAIL Research Abstracts for 2007.

[A5] Finlayson, M.A. & Winston, P.H. (2007) The Rapid Story Annotation Workbench, in the MIT CSAIL Research Abstracts for 2007.

[A4] Finlayson, M.A. & Winston, P.H. (2005) Computational Principles of Human Analogical Reasoning, in the MIT CSAIL Research Abstracts for 2005.

[A3] Finlayson, M.A. & Winston, P.H. (2005) Intermediate Features Improve Incremental Analogical Mapping, in Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2005), Stresa, Italy. 2477.

[A2] Winston, P.H. & Finlayson, M.A. (2004) Computational Politics, in the MIT CSAIL Research Abstracts for 2004. 783–784.

[A1] Finlayson, M.A. & Winston, P.H. (2004) A Model of Analogical Retrieval using Intermediate Features, in Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2004), Chicago, IL. 1557.

8. Edited Collections & Meetings Organized

[E11] Finlayson, M. A., Miller, B., Lieto, A., & Ronfard, R. (Eds.) (2016) Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’16), Krakow, Poland. Co-located with Digital Humanities 2016. Published as Open Access Series in Informatics [OASIcs] Vol. 53. Saarbrücken/Wadern, Germany: Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing. doi:10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2016.0. (website)

[E10] Caselli, T., Erp, M.v., Minard, A.-L., Finlayson, M.A., Miller, B., Aterias, J., Balahur, A., Vossen, P. (Eds.) (2015) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015). Beijing, China.

[E9] Finlayson, M.A. (2015) The NSF-Sponsored Workshop on Unified Annotation Tooling. Described in [O10].

[E8] Finlayson, M. A., Miller, B., Lieto, A., & Ronfard, R. (Eds.) (2015) Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’15), Atlanta, GA. Co-located with the 3rd Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems. Published as Open Access Series in Informatics [OASIcs] Vol. 45. Saarbrücken/Wadern, Germany: Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing. doi:10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2015.i. (website)

[E7] Finlayson, M. A., Gervás, P., Yuret, D., & Bex, F. (Guest Eds.) (2014) Special Issue 'Computational Models of Narrative' LLC. The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 29(4).

[E6] Finlayson, M. A., Meister, J. C., & Bruneau, E. G. (Eds.) (2014) Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’14), Quebec City, Canada. Published as Open Access Series in Informatics [OASIcs] Vol. 41. Saarbrücken/Wadern, Germany: Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing. doi:10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2014.i. (website)

[E5] Finlayson, M. A., Fisseni, B., Löwe, B., & Meister, J. C. (Eds.) (2013) Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’13), Hamburg, Germany. Held as a satellite workshop of the 35th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013). Published as Open Access Series in Informatics [OASIcs] Vol. 32. Saarbrücken/Wadern, Germany: Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing. doi:10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2013.i (website)

[E4] Finlayson, M. A., Fisseni, B., Genter, D., Gerrig, R., Löwe, B., Loewenstein, J., Mani, I., Meister, J. C., & Young, R.M. (2013) Symposium on Computational and Cognitive Aspects of Narratives. In Proceedings of the 35th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013). Berlin, Germany. 81-82.

[E3] Finlayson, M. A., Gervás, P., Yuret, D., & Bex, F.(Eds.) (2012) Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’12), Istanbul, Turkey. As part of the Workshops of the 8th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2012). (website)

[E2] Finlayson, M. A., Gerva´s, P., Mueller, E., Narayanan, S., & Winston, P. H. (Eds.) (2010) Proceedings of the 2nd Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’10), Arlington, VA. Published as Technical Report FS-10-04, papers from the Fall Symposium. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Additionally described in [O7]. (website)

[E1] Finlayson, M. A., Richards, W., & Winston, P. H. (2010) Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative. Beverly, MA. Described in [O6]. (no website)

Last Updated January 21, 2017