Research Projects
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1995 —1998 |
Lexical Acquisition. SPARKLE (EU Project LE-2111, a multi national effort) and Sonderforschungsbereich-340/b7, Institut fuer Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, Stuttgart University. Technical lead for IMS/Stuttgart's work on these. Our part of these projects centered on the development of robust statistical parsers aimed at lexical acquisition, for both english and german. Work included development of probability models, parsers and associated tools; semantic clustering schemes; grammar development. Co-authored the SFB-340/b7 phase II proposal and several SPARKLE deliverable reports. Led the technical section of most SPARKLE project meetings. |
1990 —1995 | Grammar Learning. Department of Computer Science, Brown University. Joint project (with Eugene Charniak), developing a system efficiently learning grammars from tagged texts. The system was state-of-the-art in terms of coverage ($> 99\%$ of test sentences are parsed), per-word entropy, and speed of learning. |
1987 —1990 | Story Understanding. Department of Computer Science, Brown University. Joint project (with Eugene Charniak and Robert Goldman) developing a story-understanding system whose search strategy used a probability-guided marker-passer. My contribution to this project consisted of analyzing the Bayesian net representation of plans and deriving formulas which could be used to prune the search space. |
1985 —1986 | Parallel Systems. Department of Computer Science, Univesity of California, Los Angeles. Design and analysis of a parallel make facility sensitive to issues of load levelling, heterogeneous availability of resources, and synchronization requirements. |
Other Professional Activity
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12/98 | Short course on Statistics for Linguists, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland, 11/98. Also given at CSLI, Stanford University, 12/98. |
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8/98 | Course on Robust Statistical Parsing at Elsnet Summer School 1998. UPC, Barcelona, Spain. |
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6/98 | Consulting work on statistically-based semantic word clustering. ILC, Pisa, Italy. |
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3/98 | Reviewing for Workshop on Very Large Corpora, ACL-COLING 1998, Montreal, Canada. |
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9/96 | Invited talk, "Valence induction with a robust PCFG", Workshop on Lexical Semantics, Courmayeur, Italy. |
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10/90 — 3/92 | Graduate Admissions Committee, Brown Computer Science Department. |