EDUCATION
Ph.D., University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Department of Linguistics, May 1998.B.A., Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
Advisor: Aravind Joshi
Dissertation: Incorporating Punctuation into the Sentence Grammar: A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar Perspective
Graduate Fellowship, Department of Computer and Information Science, 1995-1998
William Penn Graduate Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 1991-1995
M.S.E., Department of Computer and Information Science, December 1993.
Language Studies, May 1987, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa.University Of Sussex, School of Cognitive Science, Brighton, England
Interdepartmental major, combining Computer Science and Linguistics.
Spring 1987: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Graduate seminar in Semantics
Internships: Bolt, Beranek and Newman -- Natural Language Research Group
International Data Corporation -- Information Systems Planning Service
Courses in artificial intelligence, syntax, semantics and Russian, 1985-86.EXPERIENCE
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
RESEARCH INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON
RESEARCH FELLOW, September
1998-present
Member of the Reference Architecture for Generation Systems (RAGS) Project, which aims to create a modular reference architecture to facilitate sharing and evaluation of components within the generation community. The RAGS team is currently implementing a PROLOG version of an extant NLG system using the datatypes and initial architecture specification we developed. In consultation with BG Technology, ported and generalized an existing IE system for use in text mining. Defining rules for correctly handling punctuation in text generation for a project investigating the interactions between text and layout.XTAG PROJECT, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Extended utility and portability of the XTAG system, under the direction of Dr. Aravind Joshi; XTAG comprises a parser, grammar, part-of-speech tagger, an X-windows development environment, and numerous satellite tools, written primarily in LISP and C. Developed and implemented grammatical analyses for XTAG's wide-coverage English Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar. Modified the grammar and system to handle punctuation as part of thesis research. Also organized and ran weekly meetings of XTAG Project researchers, assigned research tasks and supervised work by other students.LEXIS-NEXIS/UNIV. OF PENNSYLVANIA INFORMATION EXTRACTION PROJECT
Hammered out sponsored research contract with Lexis-Nexis to evaluate existing language technologies using their data, and to build a pattern-matching tool for multi-level annotation of texts. With an inter-disciplinary team of graduate students and post docs, used tool to develop prototype PERL information extraction system for use on business news.JONES, DAY, REAVIS AND POGUE, Washington, DC
Conducted library, on-line (Lexis-Nexis, Westlaw) and on-site (EPA, other government agencies and various courts) research. Extensive drafting and editing of legal documents. Established database of environmental consultants designed for use by firm offices worldwide.BANANA REPUBLIC/THE GAP, INC.
Responsible for all areas of management in 3 million dollar Georgetown store. With a team of 1-4 other managers, hired and supervised staff of 20 and trained them to sell, provide excellent customer service and maintain the store. As Operations Manager, specific duties included performing regular audits to ensure compliance with corporate operational procedures.MID-ATLANTIC REGIONAL ASSISTANT: Ardmore, PA/Alexandria, VA, April 1988-May 1989
Handled all administrative functions for 19 stores in 3 Districts. Primary functions were sales tracking and spreadsheet analysis, and daily communication with all levels of management. Created spreadsheets used by all regional offices.SALES ASSOCIATE: Chestnut Hill, PA, February 1988-April 1988
CHALIF INCORPORATED,
Wyndmoor, PA
BOOK CHAPTERS "Evolution of the XTAG System,"
with Beth Ann Hockey, Anoop Sarkar, B. Srinivas and Fei Xia, to appear
in a
CSLI Volume edited by Anne
Abeille and Owen Rambow.
"Developing a Wide-Coverage
CCG System," with B. Srinivas, to appear in a CSLI Volume edited by Anne
Abeille and Owen Rambow.
CONFERENCE PAPERS "Sentence Planning as Description
Using Tree Adjoining Grammar," with Matthew Stone, in
Proceedings of the 35th
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the
8th Conference of the European
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-
EACL97), Madrid, Spain,
July 1997.
"EAGLE: An Extensible Architecture
for General Linguistic Engineering," with Breck Baldwin, Jeff
Reynar, B. Srinivas, Michael
Niv and Mark Wasson, in Proceedings of RIAO97, Montreal, June
1997.
"Motivations and Methods
for Text Simplification," with B. Srinivas and Mickey Chandrasekar,
poster at COLING 96, Copenhagen,
Denmark, August 1996.
"Lexicalization and Grammar
Development," with B. Srinivas, D. Egedi and T. Becker, in
Proceedings of KONVENS 94,
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, September 1994.
"XTAG System - A Wide Coverage
Grammar for English," with D. Egedi, B. Hockey, B. Srinivas
and M. Zaidel, in Proceedings
of COLING 94, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, August 1994.
WORKSHOP PAPERS "Generating Embedded Discourse
Markers from Rhetorical Structure," with Richard Power and
Donia Scott, in Proceedings
of the Seventh European Generation Workshop (EWNLG99), Toulouse,
May 1999.
"In search of a reference
architecture for NLG systems," with Lynne Cahill, Roger Evans, Chris
Mellish, Daniel Paiva, Mike
Reape, Donia Scott and Neil Tipper, Proceedings of Seventh European
Generation Workshop (EWNLG99),
Toulouse, May 1999.
"Achieving Theory-Neutrality
in Reference Architectures for NLP: To what extent is it
possible/desirable?", with
Lynne Cahill, Roger Evans, Chris Mellish, Daniel Paiva, Mike Reape and
Donia Scott, Proceedings
of the AISB'99 Workshop on Reference Architectures and Data Standards
for NLP, April 1999.
"Grammar and Parser Evaluation
in the XTAG Project," with B. Srinivas, Anoop Sarkar and Beth
Ann Hockey, Proceedings
of the LREC Workshop on the Evaluation of Parsing Systems, Granada,
Spain, May 1998.
"Mother of PERL: A Multi-tier
Pattern Description Language," with Michael Niv, Breck Baldwin,
Jeffrey C. Reynar and B.
Srinivas, in Proceedings of International Workshop on Lexically Driven
Information Extraction (LDIE
97), Frascati, Italy, July 1997. "Maintaining the Forest and
Burning out the Underbrush in XTAG," with Beth Hockey, Philip
Hopely, Joseph Rosenzweig,
Anoop Sarkar, B. Srinivas, Fei Xia, Alexis Nasr and Owen Rambow,
in Proceedings of Computational
Environments for Grammar Development and Language
Engineering (ENVGRAM), Madrid,
Spain, July 1997.
"An Approach to Robust Partial
Parsing and Evaluation Metrics," with B. Srinivas, Beth Ann
Hockey and Aravind Joshi,
Workshop on Robust Parsing at European Summer School in Logic,
Language and Information
(ESSLI96), Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, August 1996.
"Punctuation in Quoted Speech,"
in Proceedings of SIGPARSE 1996: Punctuation in Computational
Linguistics, University
of California at Santa Cruz, June 1996.
"Paying Heed to Collocations,"
with M. Stone, in Proceedings of Eighth International Workshop on
Natural Language Generation
(INLG96), Herstmonceux, Sussex, England, June 1996.
"Heuristics and Parse Ranking,"
with B. Srinivas and S. Kulick, in Proceedings of the International
Workshop in Parsing Technologies,
Prague/Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, September 1995.
"Bootstrapping A Wide-Coverage
CCG from FB-LTAG," with B. Srinivas, in Proceedings of the
3rd International Workshop
on Tree Adjoining Languages (TAG+3), University of Paris 7, Paris,
France, September 1994.
"Status of the XTAG System,"
with D. Egedi B. Hockey and B. Srinivas, in Proceedings of the 3rd
International Workshop on
Tree Adjoining Languages (TAG+3), University of Paris 7, Paris,
France, September 1994.
INVITED TALKS "Developing a Reference Architecture
for NL Generation Systems," Cambridge University,
Computer Laboratory, July
1999.
"Evolution of the XTAG English
Grammar," University of Sussex, School of Cognitive and
Computing Sciences, June
1999.
"Development and Use of Lexicalized
Grammar," SRI Cambridge, February 1998.
"Development and Use of Lexicalized
Grammar," Sharp Laboratories of Europe, February 1998.
"Punctuation and LTAG," Johns
Hopkins University, May 1996.
"TAG and the XTAG Project,"
Mead Data Corporation, May 1994.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS and
PRESENTATIONS "Inter-module communication
in RAGS," with Lynne Cahill, Roger Evans, Chris Mellish, Daniel
Paiva, Mike Reape, Donia
Scott and Neil Tipper, unpublished manuscript, September 1999.
"Re-implementation of the
CGS system within the RAGS architecture," with Lynne Cahill, Roger
Evans, Chris Mellish, Daniel
Paiva, Mike Reape, Donia Scott and Neil Tipper, unpublished
manuscript, September 1999.
"Towards a Reference Architecture
for Natural Language Generation Systems," with Lynne Cahill,
Roger Evans, Chris Mellish,
Daniel Paiva, Mike Reape, Donia Scott and Neil Tipper, ITRI
Technical Report ITRI-99-12
and HCRC Technical Report HCRC/TR-102, March 1999.
"A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining
Grammar for English," with the XTAG Group, University of
Pennsylvania, IRCS Technical
Report 99-18, August 1998.
"Introduction to the XTAG
System," with Anoop Sarkar, TAG+4 Tutorial Sessions, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
July 1998.
Review of Challenges in Natural
Language Processing, edited by Bates, Bobrow and Weischedel,
for Natural Language Engineering,
Vol. 2, Part 1, March 1996.
"A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining
Grammar for English," with the XTAG Group, University of
Pennsylvania, IRCS Technical
Report 9503, 1995.
"A Comparative Syntactic
Analysis of do so and so do," presented at the Seventeenth Annual Penn
Linguistics Colloquium,
January 1993, and published in The Penn Review of Linguistics, Vol. 17,
Spring 1993.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES 2000: Program Committee for
5th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and related frameworks
(TAG+5)
1999: Program Committees
1999: Reviewer, 9th Conference
of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
1998: Program Committees
1998: Reviewer, 36th Annual
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics/17th
International Conference
on Computational Linguistics
1996: Vice-Chair, Student
Session of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics.
1995: Program Committee,
Student Session of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics.
1994 and 1995: Reviewer,
Penn Linguistics Colloquium
1993-94: Linguistics Club
President. Organized both social and academic functions for graduate
students; oversaw orientation
and established "Buddy" program for incoming graduate students.
1992-93: Coordinator of Computational
Linguistics Feedback Forum, a weekly speaker series for
Penn students, faculty and
visiting scholars.
Conference organization:
NAGPS Regional Conference, March 1997; 1994 Meeting of the
Northeastern Linguistics
Society (NELS25); Penn Linguistics Colloquium.
Member: Association for Computational
Linguistics, Linguistic Society of America
COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES 1996-1998: Chair of Health
Care Committee, Graduate and of Professional Student
Assembly/Graduate Student
Associations Council, University of Pennsylvania; represented the
interests of Penn's 10,000
graduate and professional students in the renegotiation and ongoing
management of Penn's Student
Insurance contract.
1996-97: Vice-President for
Administration, Graduate Student Associations Council, University of
Pennsylvania; representative
to Graduate Council of Faculties, Graduate and Professional Students
Association and University
Council.
1991-98: Evaluator for Future
Problem Solving of New Jersey, an international structured problem
solving competition for
4th - 12th graders.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Natural Language Processing, Grammar Engineering, Lexicon
Development, Information
Extraction, Information Retrieval.
COMPUTER EXPERIENCE:
Extensive experience in both academic and business environments
using UNIX, VAX, and DOS
on SUN, IBM, and Macintosh computers; programming experience with
PERL, LISP, ML, C, SCHEME,
Latex, Prolog, BASIC, PASCAL, DEC 10/20 MACRO, POP-11.
INTERESTS: Travel,
foreign and gourmet foods, exploring museums, reading.
ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT,
August 1987-February 1988
Involved in all
areas of small gourmet food manufacturing operation. Reorganized accounting
and
inventory control procedures.
Performed financial analysis and market research, and detailed sales
and marketing analysis for
1987.
PUBLICATIONS
and PRESENTATIONS