Brian Murphy

formerly Project Scientist
Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
BEng Aeronautical Engineering (Queen's Belfast); M.Phil Speech & Language Processing (Trinity Dublin); PhD Computational Linguistics (Trinity Dublin)

In September 2014, I moved to take up a faculty position at Queen's University Belfast. Please visit my new homepage.

GHC 8004, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891
phone: +1 412 2683953; fax: +1 412 2683431
e-mail: brianmurphy@cmu.edu
 
Inspiration:

My interest is in understanding the fine grain of how language is processed in the mind. Several recent developments offer the promise of a comprehensive answer to these questions derived from the "bottom-up": the easy availability of enormous quantities of authentic text over the web, and the more nuanced models that can be derived from this; the application of machine learning and data-mining techniques to decode cognitive states from recordings of neural data; and the development of hybrid models that combine corpus-based, psychologically-founded, and neurally-grounded models of language.

Research Interests:

• Representation of Concepts in the Mind and Brain
• Sentence processing in the Mind and Brain
  
• Machine Learning approaches to Mining EEG, MEG and MRI data
• Corpus Based Approaches to Word Meaning
• Acceptability Judgements and Grammaticality
• Semantics and Pragmatics of Argument Structure Realisation
• Information Hiding in Plain Text
• Languages: English, German, Chinese (Standard/Mandarin), Spanish, Italian, Irish

Current/Recent Events:

• Workshop on Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging, NIPS, December 7th-8th 2012, Lake Tahoe (organiser)
  
• Workshop on Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging, NIPS, December 16th-17th 2011, Granada (organiser)
  
• Computational Session at CAOS Workhop on the neuroscience of concepts, May 20th 2010, Rovereto (organiser)
• First Workshop on Computational Neurolinguistics, NAACL-HLT, 6th June 2010, Los Angeles (organiser with Kaimin Chang of Carnegie Mellon, and Anna Korhonen of Cambridge University)
• Special Session on Neural Decoding of Higher Cognitive States, ICCS, 19th/20th August, Beijing (organiser with David Melcher)
• Tutorial on Computational Neurolinguistics, COLING, 22nd August, Beijing (instructor)

Publications:

• Brian Murphy, Partha Talukdar and Tom Mitchell, 2012: Selecting Corpus-Semantic Models for Neurolinguistic Decoding. Proceedings of the First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), Montreal, Pages 114-123. [Paper]
• Georg Langs, Irina Rish, Mortiz Grosse-Wentrup and Brian Murphy (eds), 2012: Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 7263, Springer Verlag. [Volume]
• Hiroyuki Akama, Brian Murphy, Li Na, Yumiko Shimizu, and Massimo Poesio, 2012: Decoding Semantics across fMRI sessions with with Different Stimulus Modalities - A practical MVPA Study. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 6:24. [Paper]
• David Melcher and Brian Murphy, 2011: The role of semantic interference in limiting memory for the details of visual scenes. Frontiers in Cognition 2:262. [Paper]
• Lisandro Kaunitz, Juan Kamienkowski, Emanuele Olivetti, Brian Murphy, Paolo Avesani and David Melcher, 2011: Intercepting the first pass: rapid categorization is suppressed for unseen stimuli. Frontiers in Perception Science 2:198. [Paper]
• Brian Murphy, Massimo Poesio, Francesca Bovolo, Lorenzo Bruzzone, Michele Dalponte, Heba Lakany, 2011: EEG decoding of semantic category reveals distributed representations for single concepts. Brain and Language, Volume 117, Pages 12-22. [Paper]
• Brian Murphy, Massimo Poesio, 2010: Detecting Semantic Category in Simultaneous EEG/MEG Recordings. Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Neurolinguistics, NAACL-HLT, Los Angeles. [Paper]
• Marco Baroni, Brian Murphy, Eduard Barbu, Massimo Poesio, 2010: Strudel: A Corpus-Based Semantic Model Based on Properties and Types. Cognitive Science, Volume 34 Issue 2, Pages 222-254. [Paper | Supplementary Materials]
• Brian Murphy, Marco Baroni, Massimo Poesio, 2009: EEG Responds to Conceptual Stimuli and Corpus Semantics. Proceedings of ACL/EMNLP 2009, Singapore. [Paper]
• Brian Murphy, Michele Dalponte, Massimo Poesio and Lorenzo Bruzzone, 2008: Distinguishing Concept Categories from Single-Trial Electrophysiological Activity. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Washington, July 2008. [Paper | Presentation]
• Brian Murphy and Carl Vogel, 2007: Statistically constrained shallow text marking: techniques, evaluation paradigm, and results. In Edward J. Delp III and Ping Wah Wong, (Eds.) Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IX, 28 January-February 2007, San José. [Paper]
• Brian Murphy and Carl Vogel, 2007: The syntax of concealment: reliable methods for plain text information hiding. In Edward J. Delp III and Ping Wah Wong, (Eds.) Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IX, 28 January-February 2007, San José. [Paper]
• Brian Murphy and Carl Vogel, 2005: A Comparative Evaluation of UNL Participant Relations using a Five-Language Parallel Corpus, in Cardeñosa et al (eds.), 2005, Universal Networking Language: Advances in Theory and Applications, Research in Computer Science Vol. 12, CIC, Mexico City. [Paper]
• Brian Murphy, 2003: Tuning Themes: Finding an Appropriate Model of Roles for Translation. Poster at the 14th Irish Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, Dublin, September 2003. [Paper]

Other Manuscripts and Presentations

• Brian Murphy and Carl Vogel, 2008: An Empirical Comparison of Measurement Scales for Judgements of Acceptability. Poster at International Conference on Linguistic Evidence 2008, University of Tübingen, February 2008. [Poster]
• Brian Murphy, Lorenzo Bruzzone, Michele Dalponte, Massimo Poesio and Heba Lakany, 2008: Predicting category specific effects in single-subject electrophysiological activity. Presentation to 26th European Workshop on Cognitive Neuropsychology 2008, Bressanone, January 2008. [Poster]
• Massimo Poesio, Marco Baroni, Brian Murphy, Eduard Barbu, Luigi Lombardi, Abdulrahman Almuhareb, David Vinson and Gabriella Vigliocco, 2007: Speaker-Generated and Corpus-Generated Features. Presentation to Concepts Types and Frames, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, August 2007. [Presentation]
• Brian Murphy, 2007: A Study of Notions of Participation and Discourse in Argument Structure Realisation. Doctoral Thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin. [Thesis]
• Lisandro Kaunitz, Brian Murphy, Lorenzo Bruzzone, Francesca Bolovo, Massimo Poesio and David Melcher, 2008: Predicting perceptual states from EEG single trial analysis. Poster at Rovereto Attention Workshop, CIMeC, University of Trento, October 2008. [Poster]
• Brian Murphy, Carl Vogel and Conny Opitz, 2005: Cross-linguistic Empirical Analysis of Constraints on Passive. Presentation to the Symposium on Interdisciplinary Themes in Cognitive Language Research, University of Helsinki, November 2005. [Extended Abstract | Presentation]
• Huang Chu-Ren, Elanna Tseng, Dylan Tsai and Brian Murphy, 2003: Cross-lingual Portability of Semantic relations: Bootstrapping Chinese WordNet with English WordNet Relations. Languages and Linguistics, Vol 4.3, pp509-532, Academica Sinica, Taipei. [Paper]
• Brian Murphy, 2001: Syntactic Information Hiding in Plain Text. Masters Thesis, CLCS, Trinity College Dublin. [Thesis]

Teaching experience:

• Undergraduate course in Linguistics and Computational Linguistics on Interfaces and Communication Technology programme (taught through Italian), University of Trento, 2009-2011  [Course Page]
• Summer school course on Grammaticality Judgements as Linguistic Evidence, at the ESSLLI, University of Bordeaux, July 2009 [Course Page]
• Undergraduate courses Introduction to Programming; Data Structures and Algorithms (taught through German);  and Technical Translation (German) on programme in Computational Linguistics, Trinity College Dublin, 2003-2006.

Grants:

• ADAM - Automated Diagnosis of Aphasia with Machine-Learning, €90,000 from Caritro Foundation, 2011-13 (proposer, co-PI in collaboration with CeRiN, CLIC, and BeijingNU)
• MEG Seed Fund: PI of project to fund exploratory audiobook experiments in computational neurosemantics using Magnetoencephalograpy. $10,000 over 1 year, awarded by University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre (Pennsylvania).

Professional experience:

• Post-doctoral Researcher, CLIC group, Centre for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, 2006-2011
  
• Visiting Researcher (Chinese WordNet), Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, summer 2002
• Director of Software Development (realtime web delivery of news and markets information), Qingniao.net (a Reuters company), Beijing, 1999-2000
• Senior Developer (realtime intranet delivery of news and markets information), Reuters, Beijing, 1997-1999
• Webmaster (online magazine), Beijing Scene, Beijing, 1997
• Web Developer, MEX Multimedia, Munich, 1995-1997
• Research Assistent (scientific imaging and visualisation), Technical University of Munich, 1994