Welcome to Sheila Glasbey's home page

• Before my retirement in August 2006 I was a lecturer in the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham. Until June 2003 I was employed on the ATT-Meta project, working with John Barnden, Mark Lee and Alan Wallington. This project involved the computational modelling of metaphor and reasoning with the content of metaphorical uttterances. My research interests include computational linguistics, natural language semantics and pragmatics (especially tense and aspect, bare plurals and generics, temporal metaphor, semantics of metaphor), e-drama, and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) - the development of computer systems to help non-speaking people. I have also worked on a project to study, via computer simulation, how agents with no perception or conception of space might develop the capacity to do temporal reasoning. This project was funded by the School's Ramsay Fund.

• My teaching interests included natural language processing, AI programming and AI techniques. In the more distant past I taught C++ programming, Prolog programming, database systems, computational semantics and theoretical linguistics (semantics).

• I have been second/co-supervisor for three PhD students: Frank Schilder, Alice Drewery and Jesse Tseng and primary supervisor for Yan Wang in Dundee. I have also supervised a number of final year undergraduate and MSc projects.

• Before coming to Birmingham in 2002 I was a lecturer at the University of Dundee. Prior to that, I held a one year temporary lectureship in the Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. I also held an EPSRC postdoctoral research fellowship at the Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh, for three years.

• I have an MSc from the University of Edinburgh (Department of Artificial Intelligence) in Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems.

• My PhD thesis was entitled "Event Structure in Natural Language Discourse" (Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh).

• I was principal investigator on an EPSRC project grant (held at the University of Dundee) to develop a linguistic framework for AAC and multimedia interaction. I was primary supervisor to Yan Wang, a PhD student on the project.

• I was a co-investigator on a PACCIT (ESRC/EPSRC/DTI) project on e-drama. This grant was held in collaboration with BT, Hi8us and Maverick Television, and explored ways in which e-drama systems can be made into yet more powerful and flexible tools for training, education and creative reasoning. See e-drama project.

• Here are some of my publications:

  Glasbey, S. (1993). Distinguishing between events and times: some evidence from the semantics of ‘then’. Natural Language Semantics 1(3), 285-312.

  Cavedon, L. and S. Glasbey (1994). Outline of an information-flow model of generics. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 42 (3/4).

  Glasbey, S. (1996). The progressive: a channel-theoretic analysis. Journal of Semantics, Vol 13:4, pp. 331-361. OUP.

  Glasbey, S. (1996). Towards a channel-theoretic account of the progressive. In J. Seligman and D. Westerstahl, eds, Logic, Language and Computation, Volume 1, pp. 239-254. CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca.

  Glasbey, S. (1998). A situation-theoretic interpretation of bare plurals. In J. Ginzburg, Z. Khasidashvili, C. Vogel, J-J. Levy, and E. Vallduvi, eds, The Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language and Computation: Selected Papers, pp. 35-54. CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca.

  Glasbey, S. (1998). Progressives, states and backgrounding. In S. Rothstein, ed, Events and Grammar, pp. 105-124. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London.

  Glasbey, S. (1999). Bare plurals, situations and discourse context. In L. Moss, J. Ginzburg and M. de Rijke, Logic, Language and Computation, Volume 2, pp. 85-105. CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca.

  Glasbey, S. (2000). The contribution of Linguistics to Augmentative and Alternative Communication Technology. In: Selected Papers from AILA ’99 Tokyo pp 362-370, Waseda University Press, University of Waseda, Japan.

  Glasbey, S. (2001). The treatment of tense and aspect in LFG. Invited workshop presentation, LFG 2001, University of Hong Kong (June 2001). Published in the online conference proceedings http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/6/lfg01glasbey.pdf

  Barnden, J. A., S. R. Glasbey, M. G. Lee & A. M. Wallington (2002). Reasoning in Metaphor Understanding: The ATT-Meta Approach and System. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2002). Ed: Shu-Chuan Tseng. The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing, Taipei, Taiwan.

  Barnden, J. A., S. R. Glasbey, M. G. Lee & A. M. Wallington (2003). Domain-transcending mappings in a system for metaphorical reasoning. In Proceedings of the Research Note Sessions of the 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL'03).

  Barnden, J. A., S. R. Glasbey & A. M. Wallington (to appear). Metaphor and truth from an artificial intelligence standpoint. To appear in A. Burkhardt & B. Nerlich (Eds), Reflections on Tropical Truth: Studies on the Epistemology of Metaphor. Benjamins.

  Glasbey, S. R., J. A. Barnden, M. G. Lee & A. M. Wallington (to appear). Temporal metaphors in discourse. To appear in Metaphor in Applied Linguistics. Benjamins. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~srg/Papers/temp_mets.pdf

  Glasbey, S. R. & J. A. Barnden (2003). "In the murky depths of my mind": Towards a situation-based discourse semantics for metaphor. Presented at the workshop Barwise and Situation Semantics, Context 03, Stanford University, Ca., June 2003.

  Glasbey, S. R. & J. A. Barnden (submitted). Towards a situation-based discourse semantics for metaphor. Submitted to the journal Research on Language and Computation, December 2003.

  Glasbey, S. R. (2003). Let's paint the town red for a few hours: Composition of aspect in idioms. In Proceedings of the ACL workshop The Lexicon and Figurative Language, ed. Wallington, A. M., ACL 2003, Sapporo, Japan. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~srg/Papers/idiom-aspect.pdf

  Barnden, J. A., S. R. Glasbey, M. G. Lee, A. M. Wallington (2003). Open-ended metaphorical reasoning, HCI and the ATT-Meta approach. Presented at the Workshop on Metaphor and HCI, HCI 2003, Bath, UK (Sept 2003).

  Barnden, J. A., S. R. Glasbey, M. G. Lee & A. M. Wallington (2004). Varieties and Directions of Inter-Domain Influence in Metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol 19(1), pp. 1-30.

  Glasbey, S. (2004). Event structure, punctuality and 'when'. Natural Language Semantics Vol 12, pp 191 - 211. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~srg/Papers/when.pdf

  Glasbey, S. R. (2007). Aspectual composition in idioms. In Recent Advances in the Syntax and Semantics of Tense, Aspect and Modality, eds. Louis de Saussure, Jacques Moeschler and Genoveva Puskas. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Trends in Linguistics Series. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~srg/Papers/idioms-paper.pdf

  Glasbey, S. R. (2005). A "temporal topic interval" analysis of the English perfect. Accepted as an alternate for presentation at the LAGB Satellite Workshop on Perfectivity and Telicity, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, September 3-4 2005. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~srg/Papers/perfect-paper.pdf

  Wallington, A. M., J. A. Barnden, S. R. Glasbey & M. G. Lee (2005). Metaphorical reasoning with an economical set of mappings. Delta 22: Especial:147-161(LAEL, Brazil).

  Glasbey, S. R. (2007). Bare plurals in object position: which verbs fail to give existential readings, and why? In Indefiniteness & Plurality, eds. L. Tasmowski & S. Vogeleer. Benjamins, Linguistics Today series. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~srg/Papers/bpls.pdf

  Glasbey, S. R. (2008). Existential readings for bare plurals in object position. In Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation, eds Johannes Doelling, Tatjana Heyde-Zybatow and Martin Schaefer. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. Language, Context and Cognition series.