Brief biography
I am a linguist and computational linguist. My training and early
work was in theoretical linguistics, specializing in formal
semantics. Since 2004, when I joined the
ARRAU project
(which has since ended), I have expanded my work to computational
linguistics, specifically working with annotated corpora. I am
presently coordinating an effort to create and organize a corpus of
spoken dialogue which is used in developing language comprehension and
speech of
virtual humans.
My research expertise is in the following fields:
Computational:
corpus creation and management;
reliability statistics for corpus annotation;
dialogue;
anaphora resolution.
Theoretical:
formal semantics and semantics-prosody interaction;
compositional semantics below the word level;
focus;
coordination;
temporal quantification.
Employment
- since 09/2007:
Manager of Corpus Development,
Institute for Creative Technologies,
University of Southern California,
Marina Del Rey, California, USA.
- 09/2004 to 08/2007:
Senior Research Officer,
Department of Computer Science,
University of Essex,
Colchester, United Kingdom.
- 10/2002 to 08/2004:
Postdoctoral fellow,
Laboratory for Computational Linguistics,
Department of Computer Science,
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology,
Haifa, Israel.
Education
Upcoming talks/activities
-
I will present two papers in Marrakech, Morocco in May 2008:
Field Testing of an
interactive question-answering character (PDF, 1.2M),
co-authored with Sudeep Gandhe, Anton Leuski and David Traum, at the
ELRA workshop on evaluation, and
Anaphoric annotation in the ARRAU corpus (PDF, 191K),
co-authored with Massimo Poesio, at the main
LREC 2008
conference.
-
I am one of the organizers of the
Coling 2008
workshop on human judgements in Computational Linguistics,
23 or 24 August 2008, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Recent activities
-
Exploiting Lexical and Encyclopedic Resources For Entity
Disambiguation: research group at the
Summer Workshop on Language Engineering,
Center for Language and Speech Processing,
Johns Hopkins University,
16 July – 22 August 2007,
Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
-
Quality control of corpus annotation through reliability measures:
tutorial given at
ACL 2007,
24 June 2007, Prague, Czech Republic.
Tutorial materials:
slides (PDF, 517K),
full article (PDF, 367K),
shorter version (PDF, 279K).
Events I have organized