My research is primarily in three areas:

As part of many of these research projects, I have also been involved in the open release of various data sets.

Semantics/pragmatics interface

This line of research explores how to model inferences in discourse, especially complex discourse structures such as question-response sequences, drawing on tools from formal pragmatics and logic. Sample recent papers in this area are: Biezma & Rawlins 2017; Bledin & Rawlins 2020; Frana & Rawlins 2019; Bledin & Rawlins 2019; Srinivas & Rawlins 2020; Srinivas, Rawlins & Heller 2021; Srinivas & Rawlins 2021; Srinivas & Rawlins 2022.

  1. Biezma, María & Kyle Rawlins. 2017. Or what? Semantics & Pragmatics 10. DOI: 10.3765/sp.10.16
  2. Bledin, Justin & Kyle Rawlins. 2019. What if? Semantics & Pragmatics 12(14). DOI: 10.3765/sp.12.14
  3. Bledin, Justin & Kyle Rawlins. 2020. Resistance and Resolution in Discourse. Journal of Semantics 37(1). 43–82. DOI: 10.1093/jos/ffz015
  4. Frana, Ilaria & Kyle Rawlins. 2019. Attitudes in discourse: Italian polar questions and the particle ‘mica.’ Semantics & Pragmatics 12(16). DOI: 10.3765/sp.12.16
  5. Srinivas, Sadhwi & Kyle Rawlins. 2020. An experimental investigation of the role of uniqueness and familiarity in interpreting definite descriptions. In Nari Rhee & Ryan Budnick (eds.), Proceedings of PLC 43, Vol. 26.
  6. Srinivas, Sadhwi & Kyle Rawlins. 2021. On the Indefinite Readings of Kannada Bare Nominals. In D. K. E. Reisinger & Marianne Huijsmans (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 214–225. Download: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/37/abstract3532.html
  7. Srinivas, Sadhwi & Kyle Rawlins. 2022. Anaphoric variability in Kannada bare nominals. In Ishani Guha, Sana Kidwai, & Martha Schwarz (eds.), Proceedings of (F)ASAL-10, Download: https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/jsal/index.php/fasal/article/view/245
  8. Srinivas, Sadhwi, Kyle Rawlins & Daphna Heller. 2021. Asymmetries between uniqueness and familiarity in the semantics of definite descriptions. In Joseph Rhyne, Kaelyn Lamp, Nicole Dreier, & and Chloe Kwon (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 30, 694–713. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v30i0.4854

Compositional and lexical semantics

Much of my work involves compositional semantics, lexical semantics, and the interface between the two. This heading covers a relatively diverse set of projects, but two long-running interests are the semantics of conditionals and related constructions, and the compositional semantics and lexical representation of predicates that embed clauses, such as attitude verbs and communication predicates. I’ve also worked quite a bit on argument structure. Sample recent papers covering these topics that come from a more theoretical linguistics approach include: Rawlins 2013; Rissman & Rawlins 2017; White & Rawlins 2018; Bledin & Rawlins 2019; Rawlins 2020; Talmina & Rawlins 2021

  1. Bledin, Justin & Kyle Rawlins. 2019. What if? Semantics & Pragmatics 12(14). DOI: 10.3765/sp.12.14
  2. Rawlins, Kyle. 2013. About ‘about.’ In Neil Snider (ed.), Proceedings of SALT 23, 336–357. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v23i0.2688
  3. Rawlins, Kyle. 2020. Biscuit conditionals. In Semantics Companion, Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781118788516.sem101
  4. Rissman, Lilia & Kyle Rawlins. 2017. Ingredients of Instrumental Meaning. Journal of Semantics 34(3). 507–537. DOI: 10.1093/jos/ffx003
  5. Talmina, Natalia & Kyle Rawlins. 2021. Evidential meaning of English clause-embedding verbs. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Download: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64r2h2g3
  6. White, Aaron Steven & Kyle Rawlins. 2018. Question agnosticism and change of state. In Robert Truswell, Chris Cummins, Caroline Heycock, Brian Rabern, & Hannah Rohde (eds.), Proceedings of SuB 21, 1325–1342. Download: https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/201

I’ve also been heavily involved in projects that attempt to incorporate large-scale (for linguistics) data sets collected via crowd-sourcing, with the aim of assessing linguistic theories in this kind of data. These projects often involve computational modeling. Recent samples: Reisinger et al. 2015; White & Rawlins 2016; White & Rawlins 2018; Kim et al. 2019. See also the MegaAttitude Project. This research overlaps heavily with my work on computational semantics.

  1. Kim, Najoung, Kyle Rawlins, Benjamin Van Durme & Paul Smolensky. 2019. Predicting argumenthood of English preposition phrases. In Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2019), 6578–6585. DOI: 10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33016578
  2. Reisinger, D., Frank Ferraro, Craig Harman, Rachel Rudinger, Kyle Rawlins & Benjamin Van Durme. 2015. Semantic proto-roles. Transactions of the ACL 3. 475–488. DOI: 10.1162/tacl_a_00152
  3. White, Aaron Steven & Kyle Rawlins. 2016. A computational model of S-selection. In Mary Moroney, Carol-Rose Little, Jacob Collard, & Dan Burgdorf (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 26, 641–663. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v26i0.3819
  4. White, Aaron Steven & Kyle Rawlins. 2018. The role of veridicality and factivity in clause selection. In Sherry Hucklebridge & Max Nelson (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 48, Download: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004012

Computational semantics and natural language understanding

I am interested in the ways in which linguistic theory can be applied to computational semantics and natural language understanding. I have often pursued this in the context of the collaborative Decompositional Semantics Initiative, which aims to apply ideas about decomposing meanings towards natural language understanding. This research heavily overlaps with the more linguistically-applied computational reserach mentioned above. Samples: Reisinger et al. 2015; White et al. 2016; White, Rawlins & Van Durme 2017; White et al. 2018; Ebner et al. 2020

  1. Ebner, Seth, Patrick Xia, Ryan Culkin, Kyle Rawlins & Benjamin Van Durme. 2020. Multi-sentence argument linking. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 8057–8077. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.718
  2. Reisinger, D., Frank Ferraro, Craig Harman, Rachel Rudinger, Kyle Rawlins & Benjamin Van Durme. 2015. Semantic proto-roles. Transactions of the ACL 3. 475–488. DOI: 10.1162/tacl_a_00152
  3. White, Aaron Steven, Kyle Rawlins & Benjamin Van Durme. 2017. The semantic proto-role linking model. In Proceedings of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 92–98. ACL. Download: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E17-2015/
  4. White, Aaron Steven, D. Reisinger, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Tim Vieira, Sheng Zhang, Rachel Rudinger, Kyle Rawlins & Benjamin Van Durme. 2016. Universal decompositional semantics on universal dependencies. In Proceedings of the 2016 conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 1713–1723. ACL. DOI: 10.18653/v1/D16-1177
  5. White, Aaron Steven, Rachel Rudinger, Kyle Rawlins & Benjamin Van Durme. 2018. Lexicosyntactic Inference in Neural Models. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 4717–4724. Association for Computational Linguistics. Download: https://aclweb.org/anthology/D18-1501/

Other

Here are several past projects that don’t quite fit with the above research lines.

On mathematically characterizing the properties of natural languages: Pullum & Rawlins 2007.

The prosody of Iroquoian languages, focusing on the stress/epenthesis interaction in Mohawk: Rawlins 2006.

  1. Pullum, Geoffrey & Kyle Rawlins. 2007. Argument or no Argument? Linguistics and Philosophy 30. 277–287. DOI: 10.1007/s10988-007-9013-y
  2. Rawlins, Kyle. 2006. Stress and Epenthesis in Mohawk. UCSC Linguistics Qualifying Paper. Download: https://rawlins.io/downloads/various/rawlins_2006_mohawk_qp.pdf