Mark Steedman

Mark Steedman is a Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where he conducts research in Artificial Intelligence, Computational Cognitive and Social Science, and Natural Language and Speech Processing. He is affiliated with the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC), the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR), and the Human Communications Research Center (HCRC). He also holds an adjunct professorship in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

His research focuses on Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), computational linguistics, prosody and intonation, temporal semantics, gesture in communication, and computational music analysis. He has authored foundational books including Surface Structure and Interpretation, The Syntactic Process, and Taking Scope.

The recent publications reflect a strong trend toward integrating formal grammatical frameworks like CCG with modern neural and distributional models, particularly in semantic parsing, entailment reasoning, and cognitive modeling. His work bridges symbolic and statistical approaches in NLP, often focusing on robust, wide-coverage parsing and semantic interpretation.

• Best Paper Award at AACL/IJCNLP 2023 for 'Smoothing Entailment Graphs with Language Models'
• Best Paper Award at ACL 2023 for 'Extrinsic Evaluation of Machine Translation Metrics'
• Influential Paper Award 2017 from IFAAMAS for 'Animated Conversation'

Mark Steedman has supervised numerous PhD students and collaborated widely across institutions. He leads research in formal grammar applications to cognitive modeling, dialogue, and multimodal communication. His lab contributes to CCG software and semantic parsing tools, and he continues to be actively involved in advancing the integration of symbolic and neural AI.