Martha Palmer
Martha Palmer researches computational semantics and language resources. She earned her Edinburgh AI doctorate in 1985 and moved to Colorado in 2005. With Daniel Gildea and Paul Kingsbury she published the Proposition Bank semantic-role corpus in 2005. Her shared projects include multilingual treebanks, proposition banks and annotation across scientific and educational domains. ACL elected her a Fellow in 2014 and gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023; AAAI elected her a Fellow in 2020. She holds a part-time research professorship after faculty retirement.
- Now at
- University of Colorado
- Works
- 434
- Citations
- 21,222
- h-index
- 57
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
1985
AI doctoral research
Palmer earned her Edinburgh AI doctorate in 1985. Her later research focuses on semantic interpretation across languages and domains. The approach connects linguistic accounts of meaning with the annotated examples needed to train computational systems.
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2005
Colorado and a shared Proposition Bank
Palmer moved to Colorado in 2005. That year she, Daniel Gildea and Paul Kingsbury published The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles. PropBank provides semantic-role annotation, adding information about predicate arguments to text resources.
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2014–2020
Multilingual semantics and recognition
ACL elected Palmer a Fellow in 2014, and AAAI elected her a Fellow in 2020. Her projects include Chinese, Korean and Hindi treebanks and several languages’ proposition banks. Those resources are shared projects involving students, collaborators and annotators.
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2023 and later
Lifetime recognition and research applications
ACL gave Palmer its Lifetime Achievement Award in July 2023. Her work includes semantic annotation of biomedical and geoscience texts, clinical notes and classroom conversations. After retiring from faculty, Palmer became a part-time research professor.
Sources and credits
Photo: www.colorado.edu; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: colorado.edu. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.