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:
University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Since 07/2019: Research Scientist, Institute for Creative Technologies
- 07/2013 to 06/2019: Research Assistant Professor, Institute for Creative Technologies and Department of Computer Science
- 08/2009 to 06/2013: Research Scientist, Institute for Creative Technologies
- 09/2007 to 08/2009: Manager of Corpus Development, Institute for Creative Technologies
- 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
- 08/1996 to 09/2002: Ph.D. (2002) in Linguistics with a certificate in Cognitive Science from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.
- 10/1992 to 07/1996: B.A. (1995) in Linguistics and Arabic Language and Literature from Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Not so 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.
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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
- Sigdial 2016, the 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, 13–15 September 2016, Los Angeles. (Local chair)
- Semdial 2011 (Los Angelogue), the 15th Annual Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, 21–23 September 2011, Los Angeles. (Organizer and area chair)
- Coling 2008 workshop on human judgements in Computational Linguistics, 23 August 2008, Manchester, United Kingdom. (Program committee co-chair)
- DECALOG – The 2007 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SEMDIAL), 30 May – 1 June 2007, Rovereto, Italy. (Program committee co-chair)
- Workshop on Ambiguity in Anaphora, ESSLLI 2006, 7–11 August 2006, Málaga, Spain.
- NELS 30, Rutgers University, 22–24 October 1999. (Program committee chair)
