Matthijs Westera
Assistant professor
- Name
- Dr. M. Westera MSc
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 2727
- m.westera@hum.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0001-7777-1864
Matthijs Westera is an assistant professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
Research
My research is focused on implicit questions. [Implicit question: "What are implicit questions?"] These are the things that people become curious about as they read a text or hear someone speak. (Alternatively, they are the things that writers/speakers think their addressees *should* become curious about, which may not always happen...)
How we interpret what someone says, depends a great deal on what sort of implicit question we think they are answering. This is a form of implicit meaning. Moreover, implicit questions are reflected, in various ways, by the intonation speakers use.
I teach courses in Logic, Semantics, and Computational Linguistics, and supervise students on these topics.
Assistant professor
- Faculty of Humanities
- Leiden Univ Centre for Linguistics
- LUCL Taalwetenschap
- Westera M. & Rademaker M. (2024), Can we detect the need-for-closure bias in social media behavior?. The 34th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands, Leiden. 31 August 2024 - 31 August 2024. [conference poster].
- Westera M. & Boleda G. (2020), A closer look at scalar diversity using contextualized semantic similarity, Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 24(2): 439-454.
- Silberer C., Zarrieß S., Westera M. & Boleda G. (2020), Humans Meet Models on Object Naming: A New Dataset and Analysis, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. : International Committee on Computational Linguistics. 1893--1905.
- Westera M. (2020), Implying or implicating not both in declaratives and interrogatives. Franke M., Kompa N., Liu M., Mueller J.L. & Schwab J. (Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 24. Sinn und Bedeutung 24 4 September 2019 - 7 September 2019 423-438.
- Westera M., Goodhue D. & Gussenhoven C. (2020), Meanings of tones and tunes. In: Gussenhoven C. & Chen A. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 443-453.
- Westera M., Amidei J. & Mayol L. (2020), Similarity or deeper understanding? Analyzing the TED-Q dataset of evoked questions. Scott D., Bel N. & Zong C. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 8 December 2020 - 13 December 2020: International Committee on Computational Linguistics. 5004-5012.
- Westera M., Mayol L. & Rohde H. (2020), TED-Q: TED talks and the questions they evoke. Calzolari N., Béchet F., Blache P., Choukri K., Cieri C., Declerck T., Goggi S., Isahara H., Maegaard B., Mariani J., Mazo H., Moreno A., Odijk J. & Piperidis S. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2020 11 May 2020 - 16 May 2020: European Language Resources Association. 1118-1127.
- Westera M. & Rohde H. (2019), Asking between the lines: Elicitation of evoked questions in text. [other].
- Westera M. & Boleda G. (2019), Don't blame distributional semantics if it can't do entailment, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers. 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics 23 May 2019 - 27 May 2019: Association for Computational Linguistics. 120-133.
- Westera M. (2019), Rise-fall-rise as a marker of secondary QUDs. In: Gutzmann D. & Turgay K. (Eds.), Secondary Content: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Side Issues. Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface no. 37. Leiden: Brill. 376-404.
- Aina L., Silberer C., Sorodoc I.T., Westera M. & Boleda G. (2019), What do entity-centric models learn? Insights from entity linking in multi-party dialogue. Burstein J., Doran C. & Solorio T. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers). 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2 June 2019 - 7 June 2019: Association for Computational Linguistics. 3772-3783.
- Aina L., Silberer C., Sorodoc I., Westera M. & Boleda G. (2018), AMORE-UPF at SemEval-2018 Task 4: BiLSTM with Entity Library, Proceedings of The 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation. 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation 5 June 2018 - 6 June 2018: Association for Computational Linguistics. 65-69.
- Westera M. (2018), An attention-based explanation for some exhaustivity operators, Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21(2): 1307-1324.
- Westera M. (2018), Rising declaratives of the Quality-suspending kind, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1): 121.
- Westera M. (2017), QUDs, brevity, and the asymmetry of alternatives. Cremers A., Gessel T. van & Roelofsen F. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium. 21st Amsterdam Colloquium 20 December 2017 - 22 December 2017. Amsterdam: ILLC, University of Amsterdam. 502-510.
- Westera M. (2014), Grounding topic and focus in biological codes, Fourth International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages. The 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages 13 May 2014 - 16 May 2014.
- Westera M & Brasoveanu A. (2014), Ignorance in context: the interaction of modified numerals and QUDs. Snider T., D'Antonio S. & Weigand M. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference (SALT). 24th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference 30 May 2014 - 1 June 2014 no. 24: Linguistic Society of America. 414-431.
- Westera M. others (2013), Attention, I’m violating a maxim!’A unifying account of the final rise. Raquel Fernández & Amy Isard (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. 17th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue 16 December 2013 - 18 December 2013.
- Westera M. (2013), Attentive pragmatics: An account of exhaustivity and the final rise, Proceedings of the ESSLLI Student Session. 25th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information 5 August 2013 - 16 August 2013.
- Westera M. (2013), Exhaustivity through the Maxim of Relation. Nakano Y., Satoh K. & Bekki D. (Eds.), Proceedings of Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics. : Springer. 141-153.
- Westera M. (2013), Where the air is thin, but the view so much clearer. [other].
- Warglien M., Gärdenfors P. & Westera M. (2012), Event structure, conceptual spaces and the semantics of verbs, Theoretical Linguistics 38(3-4): 159-193.
- Westera M (2012), Meanings as proposals: a new semantic foundation for Gricean pragmatics. Brown-Schmidt S., Ginzburg J. & Larsson S. (Eds.), Proceedings of SemDial 2012 (SeineDial): The 16th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. : Paris: Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7. 40-49.
- Westera M. (2012), Unrestricted inquisitive semantics and discourse coherence, Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT). .
- Westera M., Boschloo J., Diggelen J. van, Koelewijn L.S., Neerincx M.A. & Smets N.J. (2010), Employing use-cases for piecewise evaluation of requirements and claims, Proceedings of the 28th Annual European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics. ECCE '10: European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 25 August 2010 - 27 August 2010 279-286.