Marjorie McShane

About

Marjorie McShane develops cognitive models of intelligent agents that can collaborate with people in task-oriented, dialog applications. While at heart a linguist, she is particularly interested in the integration of functionalities that are often treated in isolation, such as physiological simulation, emotion modeling, and the many aspects of cognition. 

One aspect of cognition to which she has devoted particular attention is natural language processing, approached from a cross-linguistic perspective and with the goal of producing machine-tractable descriptions that can support sophisticated conversational agents. She has also worked extensively on cognitive modeling in the medical domain, to support the configuration of intelligent agents playing the roles of virtual patients and tutors in training applications such as the Maryland Virtual Patient system.

McShane has (co-)authored four books: Agents in the Long Game of AI: Computational cognitive modeling for trustworthy, hybrid AI (MIT Press, 2024), Linguistics for the Age of AI (MIT Press, 2021), A Theory of Ellipsis (Oxford University Press, 2005), and An Innovative, Practical Approach to Polish Inflection (Lincom Europa, 2003). She has published extensively on linguistics, natural language processing, cognitive modeling, and knowledge representation.

Education & Training

PhD, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University

MA, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University

Advanced Translation Certificate, Russian-English Translation, State University of New York at Albany

MA, Russian, State University of New York at Albany

BA, Russian, Grinnell College

Research

Primary Research Focus
Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents (LEIAs)
Other Focus Areas

Reference and ellipsis
Computational semantics
Mindreading (mental model ascription)
Knowledge representation
Conversational intelligent agents
Computer-based knowledge elicitation

Research Groups

Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents Lab

Teaching

I teach courses in linguistics and animal cognition: 

  • Introduction to Linguistics
  • The Linguistics of Computational Linguistics
  • Cross-linguistic Perspectives
  • Semantics and Discourse
  • Advanced Topics in Linguistics
  • Language Learning
  • Animal Cognition and Interaction with Humans
  • Canine Cognition and Science-Based Training

 

Current Courses

In 2024-2025 I will be teaching 

  • Introduction to Linguistics
  • Canine Cognition and Science-Based Training
  • Language Learning
  • Animal Cognition and Interaction with Humans

Publications

Here is an archive of Marge's papers through 2023. They are named using the convention FirstAuthor_FirstWordOfTitle_Year. More recent papers are linked to individually below.

Books

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., and English, J. 2024 (forthcoming). Agents in the Long Game of AI: Computational Cognitive Modeling for Trustworthy, Hybrid AI. MIT Press. See the tab "Appendices for Agents in the Long Game of AI" for the online appendices.

McShane, M., and Nirenburg, S. 2021. Linguistics for the Age of AI. The MIT Press. Appendices. The ebook is available open access here. See the tab "Appendices for Linguistics for the Age of AI" for the online appendices.

McShane, Marjorie. 2005. A Theory of Ellipsis. Oxford University Press. 

McShane, M. 2003. An Innovative, Practical Approach to Polish Inflection. Lincom Europa. 

Dissertation

McShane, M. 1998. Ellipsis in Slavic: The Syntax-Discourse Interface. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University.

Journal Articles, Refereed

McShane, M. and S. Nirenburg. 2019. Context for language understanding by intelligent agents. Applied Ontology 14: 415-449.

McShane, M. 2018. Typical event sequences as licensors of direct object ellipsis in Russian. Lingvisticæ Investigationes 41(2): 179-212.

McShane, M., S. Nirenburg and J. English. 2018. Multi-stage language understanding and actionability. Advances in Cognitive Systems 6: 119-138.

McShane, M. 2017. Natural language understanding (NLU, not NLP) in cognitive systems. AI Magazine, 34(4): 43-56.

McShane, M. and Babkin, P. 2016. Resolving difficult referring expressions. Advances in Cognitive Systems 4: 247-263.

McShane, M. and Babkin, P. 2016. Detection and resolution of verb phrase ellipsis. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT).

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S. and Beale, S. 2016. Language understanding with Ontological Semantics. Advances in Cognitive Systems 4:35-55.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S. and Beale, S. 2015. The Ontological Semantic treatment of multiword expressions. Lingvisticæ Investigationes, 38(1): 73-110. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

McShane, M. 2014. Parameterizing mental model ascription across intelligent agents. Interaction Studies, 15(3): 404-425.

McShane, M., Beale, S., and Babkin, P. 2014. Nominal compound interpretation by intelligent agents. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT), 10(1): 1-34.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., and Jarrell, B. 2013. Modeling decision-making biases. Biologically-Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) Journal, 3: 39-50.

McShane, M. and Nirenburg, S. 2012. A knowledge representation language for natural language processing, simulation and reasoning. International Journal of Semantic Computing, 6(1): 3-23.

McShane, M., Beale, S., Nirenburg, S., Jarrell, B. and Fantry, G. 2012. Inconsistency as a diagnostic tool in a society of intelligent agents. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 55(3): 137-48.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., Beale, S. and Johnson, B. 2012. Resolving elided scopes of modality in OntoAgent. Advances in Cognitive Systems, 2: 95-112.

McShane, M. 2009. Reference resolution challenges for an intelligent agent: The need for knowledge. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 24(4): 47-58.

McShane, M. 2009. Subject ellipsis in Russian and Polish. In Holmberg, A. (Ed.), Special Issue on Partial Pro-Drop, Studia Linguistica, 63(1): 98-132. Cambridge University Press.

Java, A., Nirenburg, S., McShane, M., Finin, T., English, J. and Joshi, A. 2007. Using a natural language understanding system to generate Semantic Web content. International Journal on Semantic Web & Information Systems, 3(4): 50-74.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S. and Beale, S. 2005. An NLP lexicon as a largely language independent resource. Machine Translation, 19(2): 139-173.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S. and Beale, S. 2005. Semantics-based resolution of fragments and underspecified structures. Traitement Automatique des Langues, 46(1): 163-184.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S. and Zacharski, R. 2004. Mood and modality: Out of theory and into the fray. Natural Language Engineering, 19(1): 57-89.

McShane, M. 2003. Redefining "paradigm" for (computer-aided) language instruction. Foreign Language Annals, 36 (2): 198-207.

McShane, M. 2003. Applying tools and techniques of natural language processing to the creation of resources for less commonly taught languages. IALLT Journal of Language Learning Technologies, 35(1): 25-46.

McShane, M. and Nirenburg, S. 2003. Blasting open a choice space: learning inflectional morphology for NLP. Computational Intelligence, 19(2): 111-135.

McShane, M. and Nirenburg, S. 2003. Parameterizing and eliciting text elements across languages. Machine Translation, 18(2): 129-165.

McShane, M. 2002. So where's that noun? Rusistika, 26: 7-14.

McShane, M. 2002. Unexpressed objects in Russian. Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 10(1): 291-328.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., Cowie, J. and Zacharski, R. 2002. Embedding knowledge elicitation and MT systems within a single architecture. Machine Translation 17(4): 271-305.

Oflazer, K., Nirenburg, S. and McShane, M. 2001. Bootstrapping morphological analyzers by combining human elicitation and machine learning. Computational Linguistics 27(1): 59-85.

McShane, M. 2000. Hierarchies of parallelism in elliptical Polish structures. Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 8: 83-117.

McShane, M. 2000. Verbal ellipsis in Russian, Polish and Czech. Slavic and East European Journal 44(2): 195-233.

McShane, M. 1999. The ellipsis of accusative direct objects in Russian, Polish and Czech. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 7(1): 45-88.

Invited Book Chapters and Journal Articles

Hudlicka, E., and M. McShane. Forthcoming. The case for deep models of emotions in affective human-computer interaction. The Handbook of Language and Emotion. De Gruyter Mouton.

McShane, M. Forthcoming. Null subjects and objects. In Bermel, N. (Ed.), The Oxford Guide to the Slavonic Languages, part of the Oxford Guides to the World’s Languages. Oxford University Press.

McShane, M., and Nirenburg, S. Forthcoming. Natural language understanding and generation. In Sun, R. (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook on Computational Cognitive Sciences.

McShane M., Bringsjord, S., Hendler, J., Nirenburg, S., and Sun, R. 2019. A response to Nunez et al.’s (2019) "What Happened to Cognitive Science?". Topics in Cognitive Science, pp. 1-4. ISSN: 1756-8765 (online), DOI: 10.1111/tops.12458.

McShane, M. 2017. Choices for semantic analysis in cognitive systems. Advances in Cognitive Systems, 5: 25-36.

Nirenburg, S. and McShane, M. 2016. Natural language processing. In Chipman, S. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science, Volume 1. New York: Oxford University Press. Online publication date: August 2016.

McShane, M. and Nirenburg, S. 2013. Use of ontology, lexicon and fact repository for reference resolution in Ontological Semantics. In Oltramari, A., Vossen, P., Qin, L. and Hovy, E. (Eds.), New Trends of Research in Ontologies and Lexical Resources. Part of the Springer Publishing series Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing, pp. 157-185.

McShane, M. 2009. Developing proper name recognition, translation and matching capabilities for low- and middle-density languages. In Nirenburg, S. (ed.), Language Engineering for Lesser-Studied Languages. IOS Press, pp. 81-115.

Nirenburg, S. and McShane, M. 2009. Computational field semantics: Acquiring an Ontological Semantic lexicon for a new language. In Nirenburg, S. (ed.), Language Engineering for Lesser-Studied Languages. IOS Press, pp. 183-206.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S. and Beale, S. 2008. Ontology, lexicon and fact repository as leveraged to interpret events of change. In Huang, C., Calzolari, N., Gangemi, A., Lenci, A., Oltramari, A. and Prevot, L. (Eds.), Ontology and the Lexicon: A Natural Language Processing Perspective, pp. 98-121. Cambridge University Press.

Lubensky, S. and McShane, M. 2007. Bilingual phraseological dictionaries. In Burger, H., Dobrovol'skij, D., Kühn, P., and Norrick, N.R. (Eds.), Phraseologie / Phraseology: Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung / An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 919-928.

McShane, M. 2002. Out of the box. In Janda, L.A., Franks, S. and Feldstein, R. (Eds.), Where One's Tongue Rules Well: A Festschrift for Charles E. Townsend. Indiana Slavic Studies 13: 147-155.

Proceedings, Refereed

Nirenburg, S., Krishnaswamy, N., and McShane, M. 2023. Hybrid ML/KB systems learning through NL dialog with DL models. In A. Martin, K. Hinkelmann, H.-G. Fill, A. Gerber, D. Lenat, R. Stolle, F. van Harmelen (Eds.), Proceedings of the AAAI 2023 Spring Symposium on Challenges Requiring the Combination of Machine Learning and Knowledge Engineering (AAAI-MAKE 2023), Hyatt Regency, San Francisco Airport, California, USA, March 27-29, 2023.

Nirenburg, S., M. McShane, and J. English. 2020. Content-centric computational cognitive modeling. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems.

McShane, M., S. Beale, and I. Nirenburg. 2019. Applying deep language understanding to open text: Lessons learned. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Montreal, Canada, pp. 796-802.

McShane, M.. and E. Kleine. 2019. Pursuing actionable interpretations of non-literal language. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, pp. 453-471.

Nirenburg, S., M. McShane, S. Beale, P. Wood, B. Scassellati, O. Mangin, and A. Roncone. 2018. Toward human-like robot learning. Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB 2018), pp. 73-82.

Nirenburg, S. and M. McShane. 2018. Two types of autonomous, language-endowed learning agents for human autonomy teaming. Proceedings of NATO-HFM-300 symposium on Human Autonomy Teaming. Portsmouth, UK, October.

McShane, M., Blissett, K. and Nirenburg, I. 2017. Treating unexpected input in incremental semantic analysis. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems.

Nirenburg, S. and M. McShane. 2017. Contextual Knowledge for Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents. The AAAI 2017 Spring Symposium on Computational Context: Why It's Important, What It Means, and Can It Be Computed? Technical Report SS-17-03, pp. 342-346.  

McShane, M. and Nirenburg, S. 2016. Extra-specific multiword expressions for language-endowed intelligent agents. Proceedings of the COLING 2016 Workshop, Grammar and Lexicon: Interactions and Interfaces.

Nirenburg, S. and McShane, M. 2016. Slashing metaphor with Occam's Razor. Proceedings of The Fourth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems.

McShane, M. and S. Nirenburg. 2016. Decisions for semantic analysis in cognitive systems. Proceedings of The Fourth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems.

McShane, M. and Nirenburg, S. 2015. OntoAgents gauge their confidence in language understanding. In Ahmed, N., Cummings, M., and Mille, C. (Eds.), Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium. Technical report FS-15-05, pp. 22-29. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.

McShane, M., and Babkin, P. 2015. Automatic ellipsis resolution: Recovering covert information from text. Proceedings of Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), pp. 572-578. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., Jarrell, B., and Fantry, G. 2015. Learning components of computational models from texts. In Finlayson, M. A., Miller, B., Lieto, A. and Ronfard, R. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN'15), pp. 108-123. Published in the Open Access Series in Informatics [OASIcs], Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Dagstuhl Publishing, Germany.

Nirenburg, S. and McShane, M. 2015. The interplay of language processing, reasoning and decision-making in cognitive computing. In Biemann, C., Handschuh, S., Freitas, A., Meziane, F. and Métais, E. (Eds.), Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB 2015), pp. 167-179. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9103.

McShane, M. 2015. Expectation-driven treatment of difficult referring expressions. Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS-2015), Article 11.

McShane, M. and Nirenburg, S. 2015. Decision-making during language understanding by intelligent agents. Artificial General Intelligence, Volume 9205 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 310-319.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S. and Babkin, P. 2015. Sentence trimming in service of verb phrase ellipsis resolution. Proceedings of the EuroAsianPacific Joint Conference on Cognitive Science (EAP CogSci 2015). Volume 1419 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, pp. 228-233.

McShane, M. 2014. A multi-faceted approach to reference resolution in English and Russian. In Selegei, V. P. (Chief Editor), Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies, Papers from the Annual International Conference "Dialogue", Issue 13, pp. 391-409.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., Beale, S., Jarrell, B., Fantry, G. and Mallott, D. 2013. Mind-, body- and emotion-reading. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP 2013).

Nirenburg, S. and McShane, M. 2012. Agents modeling agents: Incorporating ethics-related reasoning. Proceedings of the Symposium on Moral Cognition and Theory of Mind at the AISB/IACAP World Congress, 2012.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., and Beale, S. 2011. Reference-related memory management in intelligent agents emulating humans. In: Langley, P. (Ed.), Advances in Cognitive Systems. Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium, pp. 232-239. AAAI technical report FS-11-01. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. 2011.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M., and Beale, S. 2010. Hybrid methods of knowledge elicitation within a unified representational knowledge scheme. In: Filipe, J. and Dietz, J.L.G. (Eds.) Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD 2010), pp. 177-192. SciTePress.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M. and Beale, S. 2010. Aspects of metacognitive self-awareness in Maryland Virtual Patient. In Pirrone, R., Azevedo, R. and Biswas, G. (Eds.), Cognitive and Metacognitive Educational Systems: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium. AAAI Technical Report FS-10-01, pp. 69-74. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M., Beale, S., English, J. and Catizone, R. 2010. Four kinds of learning in one agent-oriented environment. In Samsonovich, A.V., Jóhannsdóttir, K.R., Chella, A., Goertzel, B. (Eds.), Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2010: Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the BICA Society, pp. 92-97. Amsterdam; Tokyo; Berlin; Washington, DC: IOS Press.

McShane, M., Beale, S., and Nirenburg, S. 2010. Reference resolution supporting lexical disambiguation. Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, pp. 16-23.

McShane, M., S. Nirenburg, B. Jarrell, S. Beale, G. Fantry. 2009. Maryland Virtual Patient: A knowledge-based, language-enabled simulation and training system. Bio-Algorithms and Med-Systems: 5(9): 57-63.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M., Beale, S., Jarrell, B. and Fantry, G. 2009. Integrating cognitive simulation into the Maryland Virtual Patient. In Westwood, J. D., Westwood, S. W., et al. (Eds.), Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 17, pp. 224-229. In the series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics. Amsterdam, Berlin, Oxford, Tokyo, Washington, DC: IOS Press.

McShane, M., and Nirenburg, S. 2009. Dialog modeling within intelligent agent modeling. In Jönsson, A., Alexandersson, J., Traum, D., Zukerman, I. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialog Systems. pp. 52-59.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M. and Beale, S. 2009. A unified ontological-semantic substrate for physiological simulation and cognitive modeling. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO-2009), pp. 139-142.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M., and Beale, S. 2008. Resolving paraphrases to support modeling language perception in an intelligent agent. In Bos, J., Delmonte, R. (Eds.), Semantics in Text Processing: STEP 2008 Conference Proceedings, pp. 179-192. London: College Publications.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., and Beale, S. 2008. Two kinds of paraphrase in modeling embodied cognitive agents. In Samsonovich, A. V. (Ed.), Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium, pp. 162-167. AAAI Technical Report FS-08-04. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.

Nirenburg, S., Beale, S., McShane, M., Jarrell, B. and Fantry, G. 2008. Language understanding in Maryland Virtual Patient. Proceedings of the Workshop on Speech Processing for Safety Critical Translations and Pervasive Applications at the 22nd Inernational Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2008), pp. 36-39.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M. and Beale, S. 2008. A simulated physiological/cognitive "double agent". In Beal, J., Bello, P., Cassimatis, N., Coen, M. and Winston, P. (Eds.), Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium "Naturally Inspired Cognitive Architectures". AAAI Technical Report FS-08-06. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M., Beale, S. and Jarrell, B. 2008. Adaptivity in a multi-agent clinical simulation system. In Honkela, T., Pöllä, M., Paukkeri, M. And Simula, O. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Adaptive Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (AKRR'08), pp. 32-39. Multiprint Espoo.

McShane, M., Jarrell, B., Fantry, G., Nirenburg, S., Beale, S. and Johnson, B. 2008. Revealing the conceptual substrate of biomedical cognitive models to the wider community. In Westwood, J.D., Haluck, R.S., Hoffman, H.M., Mogel, G.T., Phillips, R., Robb, R.A. et al. (Eds.), Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 16: Parallel, combinatorial, convergent: NextMed by Design, pp. 281-286. Amsterdam; Berlin; Oxford; Tokyo; Washington, DC: IOS Press.

McShane, M., Fantry, G., Beale, S., Nirenburg, S. and Jarrell, B. 2007. Disease interaction in cognitive simulations for medical training. In Proceedings of the MODSIM World Conference & Exposition, Virginia Beach.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., Beale, S., Jarrell, B. and Fantry, G. 2007. Knowledge-based modeling and simulation of diseases with highly differentiated clinical manifestations. In Bellazzi, R., Abu-Hanna, A., Hunter, J. (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, AIME 2007. Volume 4594 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 34-43. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.

Jarrell, B., Nirenburg, S., McShane, M., Fantry, G., Beale, S., Mallott, D. and Razcek, J. 2007. An interactive, cognitive simulation of gastroesophageal reflux disease. In Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 15: in vivo, in vitro, in silico: Designing the Next in Medicine. In the series Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, Volume 125, pp. 194-199.

Fantry, G., McShane, M., Beale, S., Forman, J., Raczek, J., Nirenburg, S., Jarrell, B. 2006. The virtual esophagus: An interactive model of esophageal physiology, pathophysiology, and simulation of esophageal motility disorders. Gastroenterology 130: A736.

McShane, M., Beale, S. and Nirenburg, S. 2006. The semantics of backing up (Or: What do to with prepositions and particles?). In Sutcliffe, G. C. J. and Goebel, R. G. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference, Session on Trends in Natural Language Processing, pp. 770-775.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M., Beale, S., O'Hara, T., Jarrell, B., Fantry, G. and Raczek, J. 2006. Cognitive simulation in virtual patients. Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (poster session), pp. 174-175.

Beale, S., Nirenburg, S., McShane, M. and Allman, T. 2005. Document authoring the Bible for minority language translation. Proceedings of MT-Summit, Phuket, Thailand, pp. 63-70.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M. and Beale, S. 2005. Increasing understanding: Interpreting events of change. In Huang, C-R., Lenci, A. and Oltramari, A. (Eds.), Proceedings of the OntoLex Workshop at the Second International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-05). Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, pp. 43-52.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., Beale, S. and O'Hara, T. 2005. Semantically rich human-aided machine annotation. Proceedings the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky, pp. 68-75, at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-05). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

Beale, S., Lavoie, B., McShane, M., Nirenburg, S. and Korelsky, T. 2004. Question answering using Ontological Semantics. In Hirst, G. and Nirenburg, S. (Eds.) Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation, pp. 41-48. Held in cooperation with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2004). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

McShane, M., Beale, S. and Nirenburg, S. 2004. Some meaning procedures of Ontological Semantics. In Lino, M. T., Xavier, M. F., Ferreira, F., Costa, R., Silva, R. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2004), pp. 1885-1888. Conference CD distributed by European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Paris, France.

McShane, M., Beale, S. and Nirenburg, S. 2004. OntoSem methods for processing semantic ellipsis. In Moldovan, D. and Girju, R. (Eds.), Proceedings of HLT/NAACL 2004 Workshop on Computational Lexical Semantics, pp. 1-8. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

McShane, M., Nirenburg, S. and Beale, S. 2004. OntoSem and SIMPLE: Two multi-lingual world views. In Hirst, G. and Nirenburg, S. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation. Held in cooperation with ACL-2004. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 25-32.

Nirenburg, S., Beale, S. and McShane, M. 2004. Evaluating the performance of the OntoSem semantic analyzer. In Hirst, G. and Nirenburg, S. (Eds.) Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation. Held in cooperation with ACL-2004. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 33-40.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M. and Beale, S. 2004. The rationale for building resources expressly for NLP. In Lino, M. T., Xavier, M. F., Ferreira, F., Costa, R., Silva, R. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004), pp. 3-6. Conference CD distributed by European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Paris, France.

Beale, S., Nirenburg, S. and McShane, M. 2003. Just-in-time grammar. Proceedings of the 2003 International Multiconference in Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M. and Beale, S. 2003. Enhancing recall in information extraction through ontological semantics. Proceedings of the Workshop on Ontologies and Information Extraction, Bucharest, Romania.

Nirenburg, S., McShane, M. and Beale, S. 2003. Operative strategies in Ontological Semantics. Proceedings of HLT-NAACL-03 Workshop on Text Meaning, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

McShane, M. 2001. One formal approach leads to another. In Franks, S., King, T. H. and Yadroff, M. (Eds.), Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Bloomington Meeting, 2000, 191-207. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Michigan Slavic Publications.

McShane, M., Helmreich, S., Nirenburg, S. and Raskin, V. 2000. Slavic as testing grounds for a linguistic knowledge elicitation system. In King, T.H. and Sekerina, I.A. (Eds.), Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Philadelphia Meeting, 1999, pp. 280-295. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Michigan Slavic Publications.

McShane, M. and Zacharski, R. 2000. Modularity in knowledge elicitation and language processing. Proceedings of the Third Annual High Desert Linguistics Conference, pp. 93-104. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

McShane, M. 1999. Predictive rules of direct object ellipsis in Russian. In Dziwirek, K. et al. (Eds.), Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Seattle Meeting, 1998, pp. 329-348. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Michigan Slavic Publications.

Encyclopedia Entries

McShane, M. 2010. Ambiguity. In Hogan, Patrick C. (Ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. Cambridge University Press.

McShane, M. 2010. Ellipsis. In Hogan, Patrick C. (Ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. Cambridge University Press.

Developmental Editing

I served as Developmental Editor for The Random House Russian-English Dictionary of Idioms, by S. Lubensky. Random House, 1995. I essentially worked as a coauthor of this work for two complete rewrites over 5 years, including writing all of the explanatory, introductory materials. Excerpts

Editing

Bello, P., Guarini, M., McShane, M. and Scassellati, B. (Eds.). 2014. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

McShane, M. (Ed.) 2014. Guest edited a special issue of Interaction Studies entitled Mental Model Ascription by Intelligent Agents. 

Book Review in Refereed Journal

McShane, M. 2007. Review of the book Lingvističeskie problemy komp'juternoj morfologii [Linguistic Issues in Computational Morphology, written in Russian] by S. A. Koval'. St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University Press, 2005, 151 pp; paperbound, ISBN 5-288-03731-0. Review appeared in Computational Linguistics, vol. 33 issue 2. 

Technical Reports

Baker, K., Bloodgood, M., Diab, M., Dorr, B., Hovy, E., Levin, L., McShane, M., Mitamura, T., Nirenburg, S., Piatko, C., Rambow, O. and Richardson, G. 2010. SIMT SCALE 2009 Modality Annotation Guidelines. Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE) Technical Report #4.

McShane, M. 2009. Advances in difficult aspects of reference resolution: Working Notes. ILIT Working Paper #01-09, Nov. 18, 2009 (62 pp.).

McShane, M. 2009. Advances in difficult aspects of reference resolution: Project Report for SGER. ILIT Working Paper #03-09, Nov. 19, 2009.

McShane, Marjorie, Sergei Nirenburg and Stephen Beale. 2009. Ontological Semantic Analysis and Difficult Reference Resolution Informing Each Other. ILIT Working Paper #02-09, Nov. 18, 2009.

McShane, Marjorie, Sergei Nirenburg and Stephen Beale. 2008. Achieving Adequacy of Description of Multiword Entities in Semantically-Oriented Computational Lexicons. ILIT Working Paper #01-08.

McShane, Marjorie, Stephen Beale and Sergei Nirenburg. 2005. Disambiguating homographous prepositions and verbal particles in an implemented Ontological Semantic analyzer. Working Paper #01-05, Institute for Language and Information Technologies, University of Maryland Baltimore County.  

Nirenburg, Sergei, Stephen Beale and Marjorie McShane. 2005. Heuristics for recovery from residual ambiguity and incongruity in the semantic interpretations of texts. Working Paper #02-05, Institute for Language and Information Technologies, University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Nirenburg, Sergei, Marjorie McShane, Margalit Zabludowski, Stephen Beale, Craig Pfeifer. 2005. Ontological Semantic text processing in the biomedical domain. Working Paper #03-05, Institute for Language and Information Technologies, University of Maryland Baltimore County.

McShane, Marjorie, Ron Zacharski and Sergei Nirenburg. 2005. From knowledge elicitation system to teaching tool. Working Paper #04-05, Institute for Language and Information Technologies, University of Maryland Baltimore County.

McShane, Marjorie and Ron Zacharski. 2005. User-extensible on-line lexicons for language learning. Working Paper #05-05, Institute for Language and Information Technologies, University of Maryland Baltimore County.

McShane, Marjorie, Sergei Nirenburg and Stephen Beale. 2005. An implemented, integrative approach to ontology-based NLP and interlingua. Working Paper #06-05, Institute for Language and Information Technologies, University of Maryland Baltimore County.

McShane, Marjorie, Sergei Nirenburg and Stephen Beale. 2005. The description and processing of multiword expressions in OntoSem. Working Paper #07-05, Institute for Language and Information Technologies, University of Maryland Baltimore County.

McShane, Marjorie, Ron Zacharski, Stephen Beale and Sergei Nirenburg. 2005. The Boas II named entity elicitation system. Working Paper #08-05, Institute for Language and Information Technologies, University of Maryland Baltimore County.

McShane, Marjorie and Sergei Nirenburg. 2002. Reference and ellipsis in Ontological Semantics. Memoranda in Computer and Cognitive Science, MCCS-02-329. The Computing Laboratory, New Mexico State University.

McShane, Marjorie. 2001. Polish Inflection Fit for Man and Machine. Memoranda in Computer and Cognitive Science, MCCS-01-325. 221 pages. The Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University.

The following is a selection of recent publications in Scopus. Marjorie McShane has 60 indexed publications in the subjects of Computer Science, Social Sciences, Engineering.

Sergei Nirenburg, Nikhil Krishnaswamy, Marjorie McShane
CEUR Workshop Proceedings
, 3433
, 2023
.
Eva Hudlicka, Marjorie McShane
Language and Emotion
, 3
, 2023
, pp.2159-2177
.
Sergei Nirenburg, Marjorie McShane, Jesse English
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
, 12801 LNCS
, 2021
, pp.24-29
.
Marjorie McShane, Selmer Bringsjord, James Hendler, Sergei Nirenburg, Ron Sun
Topics in Cognitive Science
, 11
, 2019
, pp.914-917
.
Marjorie McShane, Stephen Beale, Irene Nirenburg
Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
, 2019
, pp.796-802
.
Marjorie McShane, Sergei Nirenburg
Applied Ontology
, 14
, 2019
, pp.415-449
.
Marjorie McShane
Lingvisticae Investigationes
, 41
, 2018
, pp.179-212
.
Sergei Nirenburg, Marjorie McShane, Stephen Beale, Peter Wood, Brian Scassellati, Olivier Magnin, Alessandro Roncone
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
, 10859 LNCS
, 2018
, pp.73-82
.
Marjorie McShane
AI Magazine
, 38
, 2017
, pp.43-56
.
Sergei Nirenburg, Marjorie McShane
AAAI Spring Symposium - Technical Report
, SS-17-01 - SS-17-08
, 2017
, pp.342-346
.

View All Scopus Publications

The Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents (LEIA) Lab

Co-Directors: Marjorie McShane & Sergei Nirenburg

Our lab investigates aspects of human-like behavior in artificial intelligent agents by developing computational cognitive models. The goal is to build agents that not only serve as useful collaborators but can also explain their behavior, which is key to building trust in AI.

Building human-like, explainable language-endowed intelligent agents (LEIAs) is a long-term objective for which good strategy is essential. Our methodologies include:

  • focusing on meaning, a hard problem that mainstream AI abandoned decades ago
  • working within a knowledge-centric cognitive architecture that takes responsibility for the content, not only the design, of intelligent agents
  • building microtheories (computational approaches to operationalizing cognitive capabilities) that are useful in the near term and can be enhanced over time
  • developing generalized agent capabilities rather than demo-specific plugs
  • addressing agent capabilities holistically, rather than pursuing narrowly-defined subtasks whose simplifying assumptions undercut any realistic utility
  • applying subsets of agent capabilities to actual domains and systems

Our lab's work is primarily funded by the Office of Naval Research.

Select books

Appendices for Linguistics for the Age of AI

Appendices for Agents in the Long Game of AI

Agents in the Long Game of AI: Computational cognitive modeling for trustworthy, hybrid AI
Marjorie McShane, Sergei Nirenburg, and Jesse English, MIT Press, 2024 

Below are working versions of documentation about LEIA development. 

And here is the folder that contains all of the documents together.

 

Research Funding

  • 2023-2025: McShane, M. Principal Investigator. "The Language of Learning." Office of Naval Research. 01/01/2023 – 12/31/2025. $1,387,117. Award #N00014-19-1-2708.
  • 2020-2021: McShane, M. Principal Investigator. "Improving System Engineering Using Knowledge Engineering with UML." Office of Naval Research. 01/01/2020 - 12/31/2021. $394,178. Award # N00014-20-1-2051.
  • 2019-2022: McShane, M., Principal Investigator. "Natural Language Understanding by Intelligent Collaborators." Office of Naval Research. 9/15/2019 - 3/31/2023. $995,440. Award # N00014-19-1-2708.
  • 2016-2019: McShane, Principal Investigator. "Naturalistic Dialog Understanding". Office of Naval Research. 1/1/16 - 5/31/19. $861,455.
  • 2013-2016: McShane, M., Principal Investigator. "MURI: Unified Theories of Language and Cognition." Office of Naval Research. 
    2013-2015: $2,034,071. 2016 Supplementary Award: $250,000. This MURI was originally granted to Principal Investigator N. Cassimatis in 2009. From 2009-2013, Cassimatis was awarded $5,700,664.
  • 2008-2009: McShane, M., Principal Investigator. "SGER: Advances in Difficult Aspects of Reference Resolution." National Science Foundation. $109,321.[Base award: $98,196. Research Experience for Undergraduates supplement: $11,125.]
  • 2006-2007: McShane: Principal Investigator. "GeoMatch Multilingual GNDB Prototype Project." Department of Defense. $175,000.
  • 2007: McShane, M., Co-Principal Investigator. "Modality Annotation." Department of Defense. $75,000.
  • 2004-2009: McShane, M., Co-Principal Investigator. "Maryland Virtual Patient" - a subcontract from the DoD's Operating Room of the Future program. Approximately $1,400,000.
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