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Dr. M.A.F. (Martha) Lewis

Faculty of Science
ILLC
Visiting address
  • Science Park 900
  • Room number: L6.59
Postal address
  • Postbus 94242
    1090 GE Amsterdam
Contact details
  • Publications

    2026

    • Abbaszadeh, M., Moore, M. K., Sadrzadeh, M., & Lewis, M. A. F. (in press). Quantum Models with Multi-Stage Training for Compositional Concept Generalization. In Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE), IEEE International Conference on IEEE Computer Society. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15601
    • Hellwig, P. T., Zuidema, W. H., Stevenson, C. E., & Lewis, M. A. F. (in press). Transformer See, Transformer Do: Copying as an Intermediate Step in Learning Analogical Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Language Modelling https://openreview.net/forum?id=iwsITm1Ood
    • Owers, J., Simpson, E., & Lewis, M. A. F. (2026). As Easy as Rocket Science: Assessing the Ability of Large Language Models to Interpret Negation in Figurative Language. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1162/TACL.a.781
    • Pearson, B., Lewis, M. A. F., & Wray, M. (2026). Probing Negation Understanding in Vision-Language Models With Object Attention. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026 https://openreview.net/forum?id=euPttwoZty

    2025

    • Guo, Z., Xue, C., Xu, Z., Bo, H., Ye, Y., Pierrehumbert, J. B., & Lewis, M. (2025). Quantifying Compositionality of Classic and State-of-the-Art Embeddings. In C. Christodoulopoulos, T. Chakraborty, C. Rose, & V. Peng (Eds.), The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing : Findings of EMNLP 2025: EMNLP 2025 : November 4-9, 2025 (pp. 22130–22146). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1206 [details]
    • Hawashin, H., Abbaszadeh, M., Joseph, N., Pearson, B., Lewis, M., & Sadrzadeh, M. (2025). Compositional Concept Generalization with Variational Quantum Circuits. In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI): QAI 2025 : 2-5 November 2025, Napoli, Italy : proceedings (pp. 34-40). IEEE Computer Society. https://doi.org/10.1109/QAI63978.2025.00013 [details]
    • Lewis, M., & Mitchell, M. (2025). Evaluating the Robustness of Analogical Reasoning in GPT Models. Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2025, Article 3684. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2411.14215 [details]
    • Pearson, B., Boulbarss, B., Wray, M., & Lewis, M. (2025). Evaluating Compositional Generalisation in VLMs and Diffusion Models. In L. Frermann, & M. Stevenson (Eds.), The 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics : proceedings of the conference (*SEM 2025): StarSEM 2025 : November 8-9, 2025 (pp. 122–133). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.starsem-1.9 [details]
    • Vegner, I., de Souza, S., Forch, V., Lewis, M., & Doumas, L. A. A. (2025). Behavioural vs. Representational Systematicity in End-to-End Models: An Opinionated Survey. In W. Che, J. Nabende, E. Shutova, & M. T. Pilehvar (Eds.), The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025) : proceedings of the conference: ACL 2025 : July 27-August 1, 2025 (Vol. 1, pp. 31842–31856). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1537 [details]

    2024

    • Lewis, M., Nayak, N. V., Yu, P., Yu, Q., Merullo, J., Bach, S. H., & Pavlick, E. (2024). Does CLIP Bind Concepts? Probing Compositionality in Large Image Models. In Y. Graham, & M. Purver (Eds.), The 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics : Findings of EACL 2024: EACL 2024 : March 17-22, 2024 (pp. 1487-1500). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.101/
    • Owers, J., Shutova, E., & Lewis, M. (2024). Density Matrices for Metaphor Understanding. Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, 406, 197-215. https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.406.9 [details]
    • Tong, X., Choenni, R., Lewis, M., & Shutova, E. (2024). Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset for LLMs. In L.-W. Ku, A. Martins, & V. Srikumar (Eds.), The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) : proceedings of the conference: ACL 2024 : August 11-16, 2024 (Vol. 1, pp. 3517-3536). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.193 [details]

    2023

    • Guo, Z., Xu, Z., Lewis, M., & Cristianini, N. (2023). EXTRACT: Explainable Transparent Control of Bias in Embeddings. In CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR Workshop Proceedings; Vol. 3523). CEUR-WS.
    • Lewis, M. (2023). Compositional Vector Semantics in Spiking Neural Networks. In STEAM-H: Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Mathematics and Health (pp. 131-146). (STEAM-H: Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Mathematics and Health; Vol. Part F1986). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41862-4_10
    • Zhang, K., & Lewis, M. (2023). Evaluating CLIP's Understanding on Relationships in a Blocks World. In J. He, T. Palpanas, X. Hu, A. Cuzzocrea, D. Dou, D. Slezak, W. Wang, A. Gruca, J. C.-W. Lin, & R. Agrawal (Eds.), Proceedings - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, BigData 2023 (pp. 2257-2264). (Proceedings - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, BigData 2023). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData59044.2023.10386915

    2022

    • Lewis, M. (2022). Quantum computing and cognitive simulation. In Quantum Computing in the Arts and Humanities: An Introduction to Core Concepts, Theory and Applications (pp. 53-105). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95538-0_2

    2021

    • De las Cuevas, G., Klingler, A., Lewis, M., & Netzer, T. (2021). Cats Climb Entails Mammals Move: Preserving Hyponymy in Compositional Distributional Semantics. Journal of Cognitive Science, 22(3), 311-353.
    • Tong, X., Shutova, E., & Lewis, M. (2021). Recent advances in neural metaphor processing: A linguistic, cognitive and social perspective. In K. Toutanova, A. Rumshisky, L. Zettlemoyer, D. Hakkani-Tur, I. Beltagy, S. Bethard, R. Cotterell, T. Chakraborty, & Y. Zhou (Eds.), The 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: NAACL-HLT 2021 : proceedings of the conference : June 6-11, 2021 (pp. 4673-4686). The Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.372 [details]

    2020

    2019

    • Dankers, V., Rei, M., Lewis, M., & Shutova, E. (2019). Modelling the interplay of metaphor and emotion through multitask learning. In K. Inui, J. Jiang, V. Ng, & X. Wan (Eds.), 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 : proceedings of the conference : November 3-7, 2019, Hong Kong, China (pp. 2218-2229). The Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1227 [details]
    • Lewis, M. (2019). Compositional Hyponymy with Positive Operators. In G. Angelova, R. Mitkov, I. Nikolova, & I. Temnikova (Eds.), International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing : RANLP 2019: Natural Language Processing in a Deep Learning World : proceedings : Varna, Bulgaria, 2-4 September, 2019 (pp. 638–647). INCOMA Ltd.. https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-056-4_075 [details]
    • Lewis, M. (2019). Compositionality for recursive neural networks. Journal of Applied Logics - IfCoLog Journal of Logics and their Applications, 6(4), 709-724. https://www.collegepublications.co.uk/ifcolog/?00033 [details]

    2018

    2017

    • Al-Mehairi, Y., Coecke, B., & Lewis, M. (2017). Categorical compositional cognition. In J. A. de Barros, B. Coecke, & B. Bob (Eds.), Quantum Interaction - 10th International Conference, QI 2016, Revised Selected Papers (pp. 122-134). (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); Vol. 10106 LNCS). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52289-0_10

    2016

    • Bolt, J., Coecke, B., Genovese, F., Lewis, M., Marsden, D., & Piedeleu, R. (2016). Interacting conceptual spaces. Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, 221, 11-19. https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.221.2
    • Coecke, B., & Lewis, M. (2016). A compositional explanation of the ‘pet fish’ phenomenon. In T. Filk, H. Atmanspacher, & E. Pothos (Eds.), Quantum Interaction - 9th International Conference, QI 2015, Revised Selected Papers (pp. 179-192). (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); Vol. 9535). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28675-4_14
    • Kartsaklis, D., Lewis, M., & Rimell, L. (2016). Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, EPTCS: Preface. Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, EPTCS, 221. https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.221
    • Lewis, M., & Lawry, J. (2016). Hierarchical conceptual spaces for concept combination. Artificial Intelligence, 237, 204-227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2016.04.008

    2014

    • Lewis, M., & Lawry, J. (2014). A label semantics approach to linguistic hedges. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 55(5), 1147-1163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijar.2014.01.006
    • Lewis, M., Fedor, A., Öllinger, M., Szathmáry, E., & Fernando, C. (2014). Modelling reaction times in non-linear classification tasks. In From Animals to Animats 13 - 13th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, SAB 2014, Proceedings (pp. 53-64). (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); Vol. 8575 LNAI). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08864-8_6

    2013

    • Lewis, M., & Lawry, J. (2013). Concept generation in language evolution. In IJCAI 2013 - Proceedings of the 23rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 3229-3230). (IJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence).
    • Lewis, M., & Lawry, J. (2013). The utility of hedged assertions in the emergence of shared categorical labels. In 2nd Symposium on Nature-Inspired Computing and Applications, NICA 2013 - AISB Convention 2013 (pp. 13-20). (2nd Symposium on Nature-Inspired Computing and Applications, NICA 2013 - AISB Convention 2013).

    2024

    2022

    • Srivastava, A., Siro, C., Shutova, E., Jumelet, J., ter Hoeve, M., Giulianelli, M., Lewis, M., Schubert, M., Tong, X., & BIG-bench authors (2022). Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models. (v2 ed.) ArXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.04615 [details]

    2021

    • Lewis, M., & Sadrzadeh, M. (2021). Preface. In M. Lewis, & M. Sadrzadeh (Eds.), Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science : proceedings of the 2021 workshop: SemSpace 2021 : June 16th, 2021 (pp. iii). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2021.semspace-1.0/ [details]

    2017

    2026

    • Guo, Z., Freedman, R., & Lewis, M. A. F. (2026). From Composition to Compositionality: Discovering Reusable Structure in Polyphonic Music Embeddings. Poster session presented at The 2nd Workshop on Compositional Learning: Safety, Interpretability, and Agents. https://openreview.net/forum?id=Bz0G4MOEHG
    • Li, S., Andersen, M. F., & Lewis, M. A. F. (in press). The Geometry of Metaphor: Probing and Steering Metaphor Representations in Large Language Models. Paper presented at 9th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP. https://openreview.net/forum?id=TywuA4MyrL
    • Zhang, K., Abdallah, Z., & Lewis, M. A. F. (2026). VASAE: Naming SAE Dictionary Directions with Vocabulary-Aligned Anchoring. Poster session presented at Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop ICML 2026. https://icml.cc/virtual/2026/69258

    2014

    • Lewis, M., & Lawry, J. (2014). Emerging dimensionweights in a conceptual spaces model of concept combination. Paper presented at 50th Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour , AISB 2014, London, United Kingdom.

    Prize / grant

    Talk / presentation

    • Lewis, M. (speaker) (18-12-2018). Compositionality in Semantic Spaces, Second Symposium on Compositional Structures, Glasgow. http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/syco/2/slides/lewis.pdf
    • Lewis, M. (speaker) (6-7-2018). Compositionality in language and cognition, Second workshop on open games, Oxford.
    • Lewis, M. (speaker) (8-12-2017). Ambiguity, Entailment, and Functional Words in Categorical Compositional Distributional Semantics, University of Utrecht, Utrecht.

    Others

    • Lewis, M. (chair), Coecke, B. (organiser), Kartsaklis, D. (organiser), Marsden, D. (organiser) & Hedges, J. (organiser) (2-9-2018 - 3-9-2018). Compositional Approaches in Physics, NLP, and Social Sciences 2018, Nice. The ability to compose parts to form a more complex whole, and to analyze a whole as a combination of elements, is desirable across disciplines. In (…) (organising a conference, workshop, ...).
    • Lewis, M. (organiser), Coecke, B. (organiser), Tan, J. (organiser), Fong, B. (organiser) & Kissinger, A. (organiser) (23-4-2018 - 5-5-2018). Applied Category Theory 2018, Leiden. Category theory was developed in the 1940s to translate ideas from one field of mathematics, e.g. topology, to another field of mathematics, e.g. (…) (organising a conference, workshop, ...). http://www.appliedcategorytheory.org/workshops/

    2026

    • Tong, X. (2026). Dissecting incongruity: Metaphor and humor understanding of large language models. [Thesis, fully internal, Universiteit van Amsterdam]. [details]
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