Education

• PhD, Linguistics, University of Barcelona

Biography

Dr. Subirats' current research interests include Frame Semantics, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing. He explores all three as the Principal Investigator of the Spanish FrameNet Project (SFN), which is being developed at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain in cooperation with the Berkeley FrameNet Project. The FrameNet projects are based on Frame Semantics, a theory developed in work by Fillmore (1976, 1977, 1982, 1985) and Fillmore and Baker (2001, 2010). The fundamental insight of Frame Semantics is that the meaning of a word can best be understood in terms of its semantic frame, which is a description of a type of event, relation, or entity and the participants in it. SFN is currently building a lexical database of Spanish that is both human- and machine-readable, grounded in annotating examples that show how the words are used in actual texts. Dr, Subirats is also interested in studying the history of linguistics from a variety of angles, from bringing to light the importance of now-forgotten linguistic traditions (Subirats 1994) to analyzing traditional theories through the lens of modern ideas (Subirats 2010, 2006).