The Natural Language Processing Group at Utah

Current Graduate Student Researchers

• Nathan Gilbert, Ph.D. candidate
  
• Siddharth Patwardhan, Ph.D. candidate
  Publications:
  • Patwardhan, S. and Riloff, E. (2007) "Effective Information Extraction with Semantic Affinity Patterns and Relevant Regions", to appear in Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-07) .
  • Patwardhan, S. and Riloff, E. (2006) "Learning Domain-Specific Information Extraction Patterns from the Web", ACL 2006 Workshop on Information Extraction Beyond the Document.
  • Riloff, E., Patwardhan, S., and Wiebe, J. (2006) "Feature Subsumption for Opinion Analysis", Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-06)
  • Choi, Y., Cardie, C., Riloff, E., and Patwardhan, S. (2005) "Identifying Sources of Opinions with Conditional Random Fields and Extraction Patterns", Proceedings of the 2005 Human Language Technology Conference / Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP-05)

• William Phillips, Ph.D. candidate
  Publications:
  • Phillips, W. and Riloff, E. (2007) "Exploiting Role-Identifying Nouns and Expressions for Information Extraction", to appear in Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP-07) .
  • Riloff, E., Mann, G. S., and Phillips, W., (2006) "Reverse-Engineering Question/Answer Collections from Ordinary Text", in Advances in Open Domain Question Answering, Strzalkowski, T. and Harabagiu, S. (Eds.), Springer Series: Text, Speech and Language Technology , Vol. 32.
  • Riloff, E., Wiebe, J., and Phillips, W. (2005) "Exploiting Subjectivity Classification to Improve Information Extraction", Proceedings of the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05) .
  • Riloff, E. and Phillips, W. (2004) "An Introduction to the Sundance and AutoSlog Systems", University of Utah School of Computing Technical Report #UUCS-04-015.
  • Phillips, W. and Riloff, E. (2002) "Exploiting Strong Syntactic Heuristics and Co-Training to Learn Semantic Lexicons", Proceedings of the 2002 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2002).

• David Price , M.S. candidate
  Publications:
  • Price, D., Riloff, E., and Zachary, J. (2007) "A Study to Evaluate a Natural Language Interface for Computer Science Education", to appear in AIED 2007 Workshop on Emerging Technologies for Inquiry-Based Learning in Science.
  • Price, D., Riloff, E., Zachary, J., and Harvey, B. (2000) "NaturalJava: A Natural Language Interface for Programming in Java", Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces.

Former Graduate Student Researchers

• Sean Igo
  M.S. Thesis: Identifying Reduced Passive Voice Constructions in Shallow Parsing Environments
  Publications:
  • Igo, S. and Riloff, E. (2008) "Learning to Identify Reduced Passive Verb Phrases with a Shallow Parser", to appear in Proceedings of the 23rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08).

• David Bean
  Ph.D. Dissertation: Acquisition and Application of Contextual Role Knowledge for Coreference Resolution
  Publications:
  • Bean, D. and Riloff, E. (2004) "Unsupervised Learning of Contextual Role Knowledge for Coreference Resolution", Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference / North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting (HLT/NAACL-04) , 2004.
  • Bean, D. and Riloff, E. (1999) "Corpus-Based Identification of Non-Anaphoric Noun Phrases", Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-99) , 1999, pp. 373-380.

• William Phillips
  M.S. Thesis: Exploiting Strong Syntactic Heuristics and Co-Training to Learn Semantic Lexicons
  Publications:
  • Phillips, W. and Riloff, E. (2002) "Exploiting Strong Syntactic Heuristics and Co-Training to Learn Semantic Lexicons", Proceedings of the 2002 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-02).

• Michael Thelen
  M.S. Thesis: Simultaneous Generation of Domain-Specific Lexicons for Multiple Semantic Categories
  Publications:
  • Thelen, M. and Riloff, E. (2002) "A Bootstrapping Method for Learning Semantic Lexicons using Extraction Pattern Contexts", Proceedings of the 2002 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2002).
  • Breck, E., Light, M., Mann, G., Riloff, E., Brown, B., Anand, P., Rooth, M., and Thelen, M., (2001) "Looking Under the Hood: Tools for Diagnosing Your Question Answering Engine", ACL-2001 Workshop on Open-Domain Question Answering.
  • Riloff, E. and Thelen, M., (2000) "A Rule-based Question Answering System for Reading Comprehension Tests", ANLP/NAACL-2000 Workshop on Reading Comprehension Tests as Evaluation for Computer-Based Language Understanding Systems.

• Jeffrey Lorenzen
  M.S. Thesis: Exploiting Redundancy to Improve Machine Learning
  Publications:
  • Riloff, E. and Lorenzen, J., (1999) "Extraction-based Text Categorization: Generating Domain-specific Role Relationships Automatically", In Natural Language Information Retrieval , Tomek Strzalkowski, ed., Kluwer Academic Publishers.

• Mark Schmelzenbach
  M.E. in graphics
  Publications:
  • Riloff, E. and Schmelzenbach, M. (1998) "An Empirical Approach to Conceptual Case Frame Acquisition", Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Very Large Corpora , 1998.

Former Undergraduate Student Researchers

• Rich Warren
• Brandon Harvey, now at Accenture
  Publications:
  • Price, D., Riloff, E., Zachary, J., and Harvey, B. (2000) "NaturalJava: A Natural Language Interface for Programming in Java", Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 207-211.

• Jessica Shepherd, now at UT-Austin
  Publications:
  • Riloff, E. and Shepherd, J., (1999) "A Corpus-Based Bootstrapping Algorithm for Semi-Automated Semantic Lexicon Construction", Journal of Natural Language Engineering , 1999, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 147-156.
  • Riloff, E. and Shepherd, J. (1997) "A Corpus-Based Approach for Building Semantic Lexicons", Proceedings of the Second Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2) .

• Kiri Wagstaff, now at JPL