>>: Good morning, everyone. I wanted to welcome you all to MSR for the first, what we hope to
be, annual Northwest NLP Workshop. We have a very full crowd today. A number of people are
still arriving, and from all over the Pacific Northwest, which is really cool.
Before I turn it over to Christian, I just want to let you know a couple things, the really important
stuff. Number one, there's food and fruit and stuff, if you don't know about it, behind me. So in
the room there's a little area behind me here. Also, there's at the very end of the hall there's a
fridge with all sorts of drinks.
Many of them with tons of sugar, sure to rot your teeth, and there's bathrooms also down at that
end, too. I thought these are the important things to get out of the way first.
So I'd like to turn it over to Christian, who can do the official welcoming and overview of the
workshop.
>>: So welcome, everyone. Thank you all for coming. And thank you very much for Microsoft for
hosting. This is just fantastic to be here today. Yes, so today at this Northwest NLP Workshop,
we have eight speakers spread throughout three sessions, and also some 15 posters during a
poster session in the afternoon.
And reviewing papers, looking at the papers, this is some really great work by students from a
variety of places. The first thing we're going to do today is Fred Popowich is going to lead us in
an introduction where we all get to learn who each other is, because that's really my pain point in
organizing this workshop, was so I could learn who lives and works in natural language
processing and speech in the northwest.
So welcome, and I hope this is a fun day.
>> Fred Popowich: Thanks very much, everyone, for coming. As mentioned, I'm Fred Popowich.
I'm from Simon Fraser University, which is just slightly north of the 49th parallel. I see a lot of
other people made it across the 49th parallel today. We're really glad to be here and we don't
know of anybody that's still detained at the borders, so that's a good sign.
So, like I said, we want to get a big idea today, we want to know what's going on in the natural
language processing and speech in the Pacific Northwest. Again, dynamic planning and that, I
didn't realize we'd be having mics and be able to record and hear what people are saying.
So we're going to actually introduce each group based on the different locations they're at. But
we will have one spokesperson for that group, which who gets like maybe a whole minute, and
we'll go for 90 seconds, and maybe just Bill Dolan, give him 60. But everybody else will get
90 seconds, and then we're going to actually have all those people from that group be able to talk
about themselves for a whole 30 seconds. Maybe 45, if they're good. Just so you can start
planning. Here are the questions you have to prepare to answer about yourself.
What's your name. What's your quest. Research interest, you know, things like that. Whether
you're a masters student, Ph.D. student, other, like faculty member. They don't really count for
much.
Let everybody know if you're presenting and what you're presenting, if you're going to be giving a
talk. And finally, so you have something to talk about during the coffee break, what was your first
programming language. So that will give you something to talk about. That way, you'll see
somebody else in the room actually did that. Okay.
So what we're going to do is, so I have another mic here that I'm going to be passing around, and
I'm going to be going from group to group. We're going to first start talking about a place called
University of Washington. I've heard of that place. And where's -- we have a few different groups
from the University of Washington.
We have linguistics. We have bioinfomatics. We have some electrical engineering people from
SSLI. And we actually have a computer science representative. I'm going to get Emily to take
this mic and talk about one minute, 90 seconds. Sorry. Just Bill that has one minute. And then
pass it around, allow your group to talk about themselves.
>>: I'm here representing linguistics from the University of Washington. I'm Emily Bender. I'm
the faculty director of our professional masters program in computational linguistics. That's one
big thing going on in our department. We have Ph.D. students in linguistics. We have three
faculty members in computational linguistics and the people who are here will introduce
themselves should I answer those questions for myself now then?
>> Fred Popowich: Yes.
>>: So my research area is grammar engineering. I'm also interested in the intersection of
typology and computational linguistics.
As of September 16th I'll be an associate professor at UW. And my very first programming
language was Logo. So I'm just going to grab some UW folks here.
>>: I had forgotten about Logo. That was mine also. The first language I remembered was
PERL. But I regress back to LIPS. UW student. Sorry. Dwayne Blanchard. I work at Boeing
now. We do checking data mining in LIPS. Thanks.
>>: I'm David Gosgrubs [phonetic]. I'm a Ph.D. student, linguistics department. I'm interested in
natural language interfaces to databases. And I've got a poster over there about that. And my
first programming language was TI Basic.
>>: I'm Scott Drelshack [phonetic]. I'm actually a graduate of the University of Washington from
the linguistics department. I worked on Emily's grammar matrix thing currently looking for a job.
And, oh, my first programming language was Palo Alto Tiny Basic.
>>: All right. I'm Greg Hollander. Used to work at Microsoft but now I'm at UW finishing a
master's degree in linguistics. And my first programming language would have been
Hewlett-Packard Basic in 1973.
>>: Megan Schneider. Current master student at UW. Computational neurolinguistics. And let's
see, what was the other one? Programming language. Either Assembly or Basic, I don't really
remember.
>>: Any more linguistics from the University of Washington?
>>: I'm Scott Manti, graduate student at the University of Washington. Also an employee at
Microsoft. My research interests, a little too early to tell yet, but I'm leaning towards information
extraction, have an interest in machine learning as well.
My first programming language was Basic on the TRS 80s.
>>: [indiscernible]. Currently master student with UW. My first language was Basic.
>>: I'm [indiscernible]. I work at Microsoft. I'm also a student at the masters program for the
computational linguistics. The quest is basically just to survive the statistics this quarter.
[laughter]. And I'm beginning to be interested in machine translation, particularly for the Bosnian
Croatian Serbian languages. That language probably was Basic but it was long ago, so I don't
remember.
>> Fred Popowich: More linguistics students here at University of Washington?
>>: I'm Shu Bu [phonetic]. I also work at Microsoft, and part-time masters student. And I don't
have any research interests yet. My first programming language was probably Basic and DOS.
>> Fred Popowich: Any more linguistics students in the back there? Okay. I'm planning ahead.
We're going to then move over to bioinfomatics.
>>: I'm Joshua Howe. Masters student at the University of Washington Computational
Linguistics. And my research interests are automatic phonology induction and language
documentation. And my first programming language was also Logo.
>> Fred Popowich: Okay. I think that is the end of the linguistics people. So Leeha, there you
are. Thank you.
>>: Hi. My name is [indiscernible]. And I'm a very junior faculty. Started at UW five months ago
in the Department of Biomedical Health Infomatics. My main research area is statistical natural
language processing. And my specific projects include extraction of phenotype information from
clinical records, and I'm hoping to form an RP team under the medical school with the hope to
extract good knowledge from clinical records.
>> Fred Popowich: Great stuff. You have some students here?
>>: Unfortunately, I'm the only one.
>> Fred Popowich: Five months. Okay. We'll pass it on to Brian from SSLI. Long trip. We'll
come back to that later. And Alan is a representative of computer science, I've heard. There.
Okay. Pass the baton.
>>: Hi, I'm Alan Ritter. I'm in the computer science department at UW. There's a lot of people
there working in natural language processing type stuff. I guess this DARPA machine reading
program is pretty big.
So I think a lot of people are interested in that. I've been doing some work with Twitter and then
also on selectionnal preferences lately. And I think my first programming language was actually
C++, which was probably not a good language to start on.
>>: Fred Popowich: Okay. Anybody else from computer science here? No? Anybody we've
missed from the University of Washington?
>>: Hi. My name is Stella [indiscernible]. I'm in the masters program for linguistics. Right now
I'm studying bio NLP, and actually Sophia and I are taking a class with Moelea, but we're part of
the linguistics department.
>>: My name is [indiscernible] Saleem. And I'm also a masters student in the computational
linguistics department at UW. My interests are grammar engineering and bio NLP. And first
programming language was probably C++, too.
>> Fred Popowich: Okay. Any more? Okay. Well, I was going to go with the P and L. We'll do
that one later. So is that University of Washington, everybody that wanted to speak? Great.
We're going to cross the border now and go to the University of British Columbia. So
[indiscernible], I'm going to let you speak for a moment here.
>>: Hi. So my name is [indiscernible]. And I'm a faculty member in computer science at UBC
where we have a really large group working on summarization, seven people. And we work on
summarizing, in particular, a [indiscernible] text, so a text with containing opinions. And also
conversational data. So starting from meetings by face-to-face meetings to e-mails or blogs, and
we are following both approaches by extract summarization and abstract summarization with
particular focus on abstract summarization now where you extract information and then you
generate new language. And my broader research interests are combining natural language and
information visualization to improve like human computer communication, and I guess my first
programming language was Pascal.
>> Fred Popowich: Great. So ->>: So now I'm going to ->> Fred Popowich: Find your team now and pass it around to them.
>>: My name is Gabriel Murray. Also at UBC. So my main research area is abstractive
summarization of conversations like meetings and e-mails. My first programming language was
probably PERL and Shell programming like Bash. I guess I'm not presenting anything but I
worked on some of the work that's being presented in the posters and the talks today.
>>: I'm Nicklaus Fitzgerald. I'm an undergraduate from UBC in the cognitive systems program.
So I'm interested in all aspects of intelligence. But computational linguistics is a natural fit. So
I've been working on an abstractive summarization system that I'll be presenting this afternoon
called SS, and my first programming was actually like with Microsoft Excel. I'd make these
programs. But then I learned C++.
>>: Hi. I'm Shopic. And I'm a Ph.D. student here at UBC. And I'm interested in finding topics in
e-mails and machine learning and NLP. And my first programming language was C.
>>: Hi. My name is Wanna Shandu [phonetic]. I'm a masters student at UBC. I'm presenting a
poster on domain adaptation of extractive summarization. My first programming language was in
the '90s, and I think it was Visual Basic and then HTML. It's not real languages, but [laughter].
>>: Hi. My name Samad Elite [phonetic]. Masters student at UBC, presenting a poster on
developing a disclosed passive free valid text. That's what I work on, disclosing valid text. And I
think my first programming was I think C.
>> Fred Popowich: Great. Any more UBC people here? So thanks very much for the contingent
from the -- that's the west side of Greater Vancouver. You'll be hearing more things from the east
side of Greater Vancouver shortly. I think it's time to cross the border again. I think we might
have a few people, there's an organization called Microsoft Research. So, Bill, what in the world
does Microsoft Research do?
>>: Actually, first I'd kind of like to hear about the schism between east and west. Is this going to
get ugly later on in the day? So I'm Bill Dolan. I'm the manager of the Natural Language
Processing Group here at Microsoft Research. Again, to reiterate what Will said. Welcome.
This is our building. There are about 300 or so researchers here in the Redmond branch of MSR
and, of course, lots of other branches around the world.
The NLP group is about 30 people. And we are a little bit odd in that the group encompasses
both traditional research group with about ten people and a product group working on machine
translation.
So Translate That Bing.com is right from our group. And there's a lot of interaction between the
researchers and product people working on that. The research group works on a whole host of
problems that are familiar I'm sure to all of you. Things like information retrieval, summarization.
Let's see, input method editor for Asian languages. What am I forgetting? ESL grammar
checking. My own personal interest is in the area of semantics and paraphrase. One of the
things we do, especially since we have this machine translation effort sitting right here in the
group, is that we try to use that hammer repeatedly. So we're using it for things like building
spellers, building grammar checkers, building paraphrase tools. And, again, it's just great to have
this close interaction between the research team and the product group.
What else can I say? I think you said I could have maybe two seconds or something and I think
I've probably used it all up.
>> Fred Popowich: You can pass it on to the rest of the different Microsoft people here so we
can hear what they're doing.
>>: My name is Michael Gamon. I work in sentiment detection, error detection, specifically for
learners of English and a bunch of other things, e-mail categorization, things like that.
My first programming language was probably Treble Prologue, and I would not recommend it to
anybody.
>>: Can I hijack this before I pass it on, I want to make a plea for any potential interns for next
year, please apply if you're looking for an internship. We're always looking. I forgot to mention
my first programming language was Prologue, which tells you way too much about me.
>>: So I'm Chris Quirk. Also a researcher at Microsoft Research here. I work mostly on machine
translation, although I've got the chance to toy with some other things like Paraphrase and more
recently a little bit of work in bio NLP. And first programming language, it must have been Basic
on an Apple 2 or a VIC 20 or something. Bob.
>>: I'm Bob Moore. I'm a principal researcher here in the NLP group here at Microsoft Research.
I worked on a lot of different aspects of NLP over the years. But for the last few years I focused
mainly on statistical machine translation. And my first programming language was Fortran with
format for the IBM 1620, using punch cards, and that's the way we liked it. [laughter].
>>: I think we have a ->> Fred Popowich: There's more Microsoft people here, yes.
>>: Hi. My name is [indiscernible], and I'm part of the product group and machine translation,
and I help with the machine translation evaluation. And my first programming language was
Basic on an Apple 2.
>>: Hi. My name is [indiscernible] Suzuki. Also a researcher here at the NLP group here
Microsoft Research. Now, so I'm interested in -- so because we are in this research team where
we do research and then there's a product team very nearby and also in the company there are a
lot of product needs that's bridging computational linguistics and NLP applications. So I worked
recently on analyzing queries. And trying to take advantage of search query log data for national
language processing, especially for Japanese. I'm generally interested in anything about
processing Japanese, and I have worked on input method for Japanese as well.
First programming language. That's called G. And you probably don't know it. So talk to me
later if you're interested in what that is. It's C plus half plus.
>> Fred Popowich: More Microsoft?
>>: Hi. My name is Lucy Vanderwendy, and I'm a researcher in the NLP group here. My
primary interests have been broadly semantics. So I've looked at semantic networks that we
extract automatically from text, with fairly deep linguistic knowledge.
So we had built something called My Net, which was at the level of a logical form. So you
abstract over syntactic, different syntactic realizations. And that work is definitely coming back
and it's becoming quite, quite of an interest to the whole community now. The purpose of that
would be for information extraction. And right now I'm focusing on bio NLP. I've also worked on
summarization.
I'll be showing a poster together with another Microsoft employee [indiscernible]. He's interested
in the evaluation of summarization without the use of reference summarization. So we'll show
that poster later on. First programming language, has anybody ever heard of PL-1?
>>: Hi. I'm [indiscernible] Audrey. And I'm the new developer with the NLP team. So actually
almost a masters student in NLP, I guess. I've been working a little bit on bio NLP, and that's
about it. And my first programming language was Pascal.
>> Fred Popowich: Great. Will.
>>: Hi. I'm Will Lewis. I'm in the MT product team, which is an incubation team inside of
Microsoft Research NLP team. And I was formally faculty with Emily and Fay at UW, so I know a
number of you from there.
My first programming language actually was Basic. I took a class at the Lawrence Hall of
Science at Berkeley, and it was the first programming language on teletypes. And I actually
taught Logo at a summer camp for several years in the Sierra Nevada.
>>: I'm [indiscernible], principal researcher at Microsoft Research in speech group. I've been
working on speech recognition and speech-to-speech translation. First language, programming,
Fortran.
>> Fred Popowich: Fortran. Good stuff. Any more Microsoft people here? No. Okay. We can
always go upstairs, I guess. So what I'd like to move on to next is the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory. And there was a vote, and Liam wasn't in the room, so everybody said that Liam
would be the spokesperson.
>>: So Michelle Gregory was originally going to introduce us but she wasn't able to make it. She
tells me she regrets not being able to be here.
We're a Department of Energy research lab. So we do applied research and development for the
Department of Energy and other government agencies and private industry. Here with an interest
in NLP are people from two groups, at least two groups, I guess. The knowledge systems group,
located in Richland, Washington, and also the human centered analytics group here in Seattle.
And so I'm Liam McGrath, a research scientist at P and L. And I'm a research student with Emily
at UW. My interests are in information extraction and knowledge bases and ontologies and my
first language was C++.
>>: Hi. I'm Kelly O'Hara. I'm a graduate of Emily's program at UW, and now I'm working at P
and L doing mostly things related to information retrieval, information extraction, and my first
programming language was Basic on an Apple 2-E.
>>: I'm Eric Bell. I work at P and L. I'm also a masters student at UW. I work a lot statistical
processing, particularly classifier, classification algorithms, and also a lot of data harvesting. And
my original language was Visual Basic .NET, actually. I'm young. [laughter].
>>: Stewart Rose, research engineer in the Information Analytics Group at P and L. Presenting
a paper on rapid elementary abstraction today. And Kelly and Eric are also presenting posters. I
mostly do research in text analysis systems and also visual analytics systems for our clients. And
my first programming language was probably Basic on an Apple 2-plus.
>>: Curt Quarly, scientist at P and L too and knowledge systems, finishing up a post-doc there
and starting on as scientist. So my interests are health infomatics and social media analytics and
applying that to sentiment analysis of individual intervention beliefs. So vaccination, et cetera,
and then also biosurveillance. And my first programming language was TI-99. Basic and it was a
bowling game. [laughter].
>>: Fred Popowich: More people from your team?
>>: No, I think that's it.
>>: Fred Popowich: Okay. Well, next on the list we're going to go north of the border again. So
to Simon Fraser University. And we were hoping that Anoop Sarcar, my partner in crime and
computer scientist would be able to join us today, but we managed to schedule this when he's in
Britain. That's why he's unable to join us today. And he's due to fly out of Britain this weekend. I
think they may actually get out of there. So that's volcanos permitting.
The Natural Language Lab at Simon Fraser University has been around since, gee, since 1980s,
doing all sorts of things, whether it be, in the early days, doing natural language interfaces to
databases and moving on to things like machine translation, information extraction, information
retrieval, and just a broad range of different natural language processing activities.
I will, before I turn it over to the people in the lab, our students and that, I guess my own interests
most recently I've been really focused a lot on machine translation and information extraction.
And particularly since I was out of the university on leave for a while doing work in the private
sector in that area, I guess the text analytics was a nice name they could call it. That way they
have trade shows on it, called it text analytics trades shows. What I'm really happy about, I'm in
my last week before I leave my position as associate dean at applied science at Simon Fraser.
Looking forward to that. It seems like it's going to align with creation of new analytics institute at
UFFU which I've heard rumors I'm the interim director of and I've heard rumors there's a major
American aerospace organization relating something to it next week so you'll probably keep
seeing me on this side of the border too and my first language programming language, which is
one that nobody's mentioned here before, APL. If anybody has ever heard of that one. Pretty
frightening, yes. So I'll pass it on to the Simon Fraser university team here.
>>: Hello, everyone. My name is Maxim. I'm a Ph.D. student at SFU. My research interests are
translational in Lotus languages and my first programming language was Pascal.
>>: Milan Toflaski [phonetic], Ph.D. student at SFU. Interests are discourse analysis. I've done
some work in sentiment analysis and also text visualization as well. Pascal.
>>: My name is [indiscernible]. I'm a Ph.D. student again from SFU. I work on machine
translation and I'm also starting into synchronous grammar induction, and I think I started with C
as my first language. And today I'll be talking about some incremental decoder. Thanks.
>>: I forgot say, I started on C and I have a poster as well to present later. Sorry about that.
>>: Hi I'm Ann Clifton. I'm a masters student at Simon Fraser. And my research interest is
primarily machine translation, and I'll be giving a talk today on some work that we've been doing
so far. Oh, and my first language was C++.
>>: Hi. My name is Najeet Rasmara [phonetic]. I'm a Ph.D. student at SFU working with Fred.
And my research interest is tree-based statistical machine translation, and my first programming
language was basic.
>>: Hi my name is Ascar Sappel [phonetic]. I'm a masters student of Simon Fraser University,
Fred's student. I like to do my master thesis under some morphological complex language like
Turk. So my first language was Basic.
>>: Hi. I'm Yung Ching Kim, masters student at SFU. And I am planning on working on motion
translation in the future. I just started last semester. And my first language was Java, yeah.
>>: Hi. My name is Yu Dong Lu [phonetic]. I recently received my Ph.D. in NLP. On the job
market now. And I have been working on using lexical [indiscernible] grammar as semantic
labeling. This afternoon I'm going to present to you a very exciting result on that front, and my
first programming language, I think, it was Pascal. Thank you.
>>: Thanks, you dong and what we're going to do here is just briefly diverge. We have an SFU
alumnus here. So we're going to pass it on to Pat to talk about what his research interests are
and where he currently is.
>>: Hello. My name is Pat Patriraman [phonetic], work for a small company called Converse
within bicycling distance here. We specialize in voice recognition for embedded devices. Mostly
cell phones. Almost exclusively cell phones these days. And my background is in computational
linguistics. I'm now head of the core technology group at converse say. But I'm concerned with
all things at the intersection and union of voice recognition and natural language processing
technology. In voice recognition, primarily things like spelling, to pronunciation, guessing phone
sets, phonology and so forth and also in technologies where natural language processing
complements voice recognition and enhances the value of it in a voice recognition products and
stuff. And prior to working for Converse, I worked in bank BC for what is now SAP used to be
called Seagate Software in those days. We got a group going tried to do natural interface
language for databases that were queried through Crystal reports which is probably a fairly
commonly known product. And prior to that I did my Ph.D. at SFU in computer science/natural
language translation and Fred Popowich was upon one of my thesis supervisors. The first
program I wrote had one statement that did something along the lines of print LF hello new line.
[laughter].
>> Fred Popowich: Thanks, Pat. Okay. We're going to be moving on to Oregon Health and
Science University and Brian's going to be the spokesperson.
>>: I'm the loudmouth of the group, so they say. So we're coming from center for spoken
language understanding at Oregon Health and Science University to place that in reference we're
the part of the institute formerly known as OGI.
So if you remember OGI from back in the day, we're the descendant organization that has been
sucked into OHSU which has a long history of doing that to smaller institutions.
But anyway, because we're now part of a larger health and science organization, we, in addition
to the sort of basic level NLP and speech research, we also look at applications in the health
domain. So things like augmentative communication. So projects involving speech
transformation for diarthric speech. Brain computer interface. We have language modeling and
other processing for these sorts of applications, as well as automated assessment for neuro
developmental or neuro degenerative disorders. These are the sorts of applications that we're
trying to push speech and NLP into. We have ten faculty working in areas of speech, NLP and
computational biology. And on the order of 20 graduate students. And we have four of the
faculty here and we have students that are advised by five of the faculty. So we have a pretty
good representation of the group as a whole.
And everybody can talk about their own thing there. I tend to focus on natural language
processing, language modeling, structured processing, parsing, and other fun stuff like that. First
programming language was Java. No. It was [laughter] it was Basic on an Apple 2-E probably.
>> Fred Popowich: Why don't you pass it around to your team.
>>: Christian. Sorry.
>>: Since I'm in the front I can go. So my name is Christian Monson. I'm a post-doc at OHSU
primarily working with Brian Roarke and also with a bit with Zach Chefron who is over there. And
so about a year ago, a little bit, I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Ph.D. So my
thesis was on unsupervised morphology induction. And I followed up a little bit on morphology
learning while at OHSU. The ultimate goal over the next eight months or so that I have left as a
post-doc is to apply these morphemes that we're discussing, they are smaller pieces of words,
and we're trying to fold these small pieces into a speech recognition system ultimately for the
purpose of spoken term detection.
And I did Basic on an Apple 2-E when I was like in sixth grade we performed the Olympic rings to
appear on the screen. And it played the Olympic theme. It was awesome.
>> Fred Popowich: Okay. We'll pass the mic around.
>>: So I'm Richard Sprout, and I'm actually just recently joined the Center for Spoken Language
at OSU before that I was University of Illinois before that I was at AT&T labs for 20 years. So I've
also visiting scientist at Google. So the -- thought I'd mention that. So I've worked on a bunch of
stuff over the years. I've worked on text normalization multi-text processing. I did one of the first
unsupervised translations on Chinese and text to speech and even dabbled in things like machine
translation years ago. At OHSU I'm working on among other things automated assessment of
neuro developmental disorders, basically using parsing of other technology to try to figure out
where children are in their language development.
First programming language, I guess Basic on a Teletype to the San Diego city school mainframe
computer but the first serious programming language I used was on the LISP on the symbolic
machines.
>>: Hi. I'm Rebecca Lunsford. My interests. Right now I'm working on finishing a Ph.D. I'm
doing that by creating dialogue policies that adapt to the needs and the abilities of diverse users,
specifically focusing on hearing issues or challenging environments.
My first programming language was Pascal. I think the rest of us are over there.
>> Fred Popowich: And you have a poster.
>>: And if you want to hear more about it, I have a poster.
>>: My name is Seeger Fisher, Ph.D. student at OHSU. My interests are discourse parsing of
text and summarization. My first language was Basic also at the Lawrence Health Science on a
Teletype.
>>: My name is Yongchin Chin. I come from OHSU. Ph.D. student. And broadly I'm interested
in text processing, but I'm just starting. [laughter] first programming language, C.
>>: Hi. I'm Ethan Sulfridge, Ph.D. student at OHSU. My interests are in spoken dialogue
systems, specifically turn taking, and my first programming language, I think, was Visual Basic. I
also have a presentation this afternoon at 4:30.
>>: [indiscernible] Ph.D. student at OHSU. I work on statistical speech recognition and
discriminative modeling. I am presenting today. At my first program, language program was C.
>>: I'm Emily Tucker Prudmore, Ph.D. student at OHSU. My research interests are using
speech technology and natural language processing for diagnosing neurodevelopmental
disorders in children like autism. I have a poster over there. It's not really about that. But it's
based on data that we collected to look at that. And my first programming language was Basic on
a vacs terminal that my mom brought home from school.
>>: Hello. My name is Nate Botenstaub. Ph.D. student with Brian Roarke. I work mainly on
syntactic parsing. I'm going to have a talk about some work we've done. It's actually the very last
talk of the day. So the worst time, probably.
>> Fred Popowich: Everything leads up to it.
>>: Yeah. What else? First programming language, I guess it was Q Basic, I think that stands
for Quick Basic but I'm not so sure what was quick about it. [laughter] I also have some
connections with Nuance, and I know they're hiring. So anyone that's interested could talk to me,
too.
>>: Aaron Dunlap, Ph.D. student at OHSU. Primarily interested in efficient and scaleable
context-free parsing. And I have a poster if you want this afternoon. And I think about the same
time I ran into Logo and Apple 2-E Basic. I don't remember which was worst.
>>: I'm Peter Iman, research associate professor. My two students are Rebecca and Ethan, and
Rebecca -- sorry, Ethan has a talk. And my research interest is in the interactionnal aspects of
dialogue such as filled pauses, disfluencies, discourse markers. I also do work on like dialogue
management, mainly with reinforcement learning. I also do work on detecting stuttering as well.
And my first programming language was ACL, which was -- which it was just a toy programming
language that we sent in punch cards and got back the output a week later. Hopefully if we didn't
have any programming mistakes.
>>: I'm Zach Chefron. My first programming language was TI's Assembly Language for digital
signal processing. So that should tell you something about my background. So I'm a faculty at
OHSU. I work on speech processing and recognition mainly. But I'm also interested in using
prosodic information for parsing and we've done some work on that particularly detecting
disfluencies and improving parsing.
Yeah, apart from that, I also work on problems related to assessment, particularly in older adults
trying to detect neurodevelopmental, neurodegenerative disorders.
>> Fred Popowich: More? There we go.
>>: I'm [indiscernible]. I'm Ph.D. student from OHSU Center for Spoken Language
Understanding. Working with Brian Roarke. And my research interest topic is NLP, like,
information and tracting and modeling, my first programming language was basic on a Microsoft
Windows machine.
>>: I'm Asude [phonetic], Ph.D. student at OHSU working with Richard on a kind of
text-to-picture generation system. It has a kind of core as a scenario-based, knowledge base.
So my general interest is computational semantics. And my first programming language was
Quick Basic.
>>: My name is Geisa Keyshan [phonetic], visiting student researcher, Fulbright scholar. And I'm
working with Ian Fansantan [phonetic] with the new development researcher detection. My main
research topic is speech processing. I'm also very interested in natural language processing.
That's why I'm here, but I'm not presenting anything.
And then my first language was Basic on a Commodore Plus 4.
>>: Hi. My name is Mason [indiscernible]. I'm Ph.D. student and I work with Zach, and my
research interests, speech processing. I think my first language was Pascal. Thanks.
>> Fred Popowich: Any more Oregon people here? You see, we're not biased for borders. We
go north across the border or south across the border.
>>: We do have an affiliated faculty member from a local university Pacific university which is
Shereen, maybe, at this time it would be appropriate for Shereen.
>>: I'm Shereen Koja, associate professor at Pacific University, which is a small university in
Forest Grove, Oregon. I work in the College of Arts and Sciences. There's three computer
science faculty there. But my background is computational linguistics. I work with Arabic,
stemming, part of speech tagging. I'm interesting in colloquial Arabic and processing that. And
my first programming language was Pascal. And I'd like to introduce my husband who is here
with me because I'm due to give birth in a few weeks. So he didn't want me to come alone.
>>: Hello. I'm Adam Hir. I'm a software architect at Intel Corporation. I work in high
performance computer stream processing working in language and standards. Yes, my principal
function is to be the chauffeur. My first language was Basic on a Commodore Vic 20.
>> Fred Popowich: Great. I think we probably no more Oregon people here? Because I know
we may have missed some. No. We may have missed some people. So raise your hand if you
have not spoken yet. Okay. So pass the mic to somebody that's ->>: Hi. I'm Ryan Georgian, Ph.D. student at UW. Pardon my late arrival. The code link deadline
was ten hours ago. I haven't slept much. I specialize in adapting tools for low density languages
and kind of unsupervised techniques and trying to get those to work, and I'll have a poster up at
some point.
>>: Hi. My name is Sala Etmondy [phonetic]. I'm a software engineer with machine translation,
incubation project at Microsoft Research, and I'm also a Ph.D. student at Michigan State
University. And my interest is in statistical machine translation.
>> Fred Popowich: Okay. Great. Raising hands, who else has not spoken yet? I think that
about covers it. That's been ideal. One short question. Milan, did we make the code link
deadline? Good. That's why he's a bit more blurry eyed than I am. So this is great. So you see
the idea with this, and wow I've said we would be 50 minutes. We're almost 50 minutes for this. I
guess I was being too strict on some of these things.
But the important thing for this it's given me a chance to hear what everybody's research is about.
And this way when we're at the coffee breaks, which are coming up soon in the sessions and all
that we can really get an idea for who is doing what and get an idea from these posters. I know
some people that got in late haven't had a chance to put up their posters. I'm really looking
forward to the conversations we'll have during the breaks today to hearing the talks and seeing
what's up on those posters. Because after reviewing some of those papers, you know, it's nice to
be able to see what's happened with them up there. And from my perspective, I just want to say
thanks very much everybody for coming together this morning so that we can start to know each
other and each other's research. Pass it back to you.
>>: Okay. So ending a few minutes early but that's no problem. We'll just talk amongst
ourselves and get to know each other better. We will reconvene at 11:30 for the first oral session.