NLP Reading Group

The reading group attempts to keep abreast of current trends in natural language processing research. We typically read one or two recent NLP conference papers each week, and occasionally look at material from the machine learning, statistics, and linguistics communities as well.

Starting in 2008, we will be posting the weekly readings here. Past readings since 2001 will be posted shortly.

Fall 2007

Date/Time	Presenter	Paper(s)	Supporting Papers/Notes
ddd

Summer 2007

Date/Time	Presenter	Paper(s)	Supporting Papers/Notes
May. 10	David Smith	M. Johnson, T. Griffiths, and S. Goldwater Bayesian Inference for PCFGs via Markov Chain Monte Carlo HLT/NAACL 2007

Spring 2007

Date/Time	Presenter	Paper(s)	Supporting Papers/Notes
Apr. 19	John Blatz	A. Prieditis Machine discovery of Effective Admissible Heuristics Machine Learning Journal, 1993
Apr. 12	Markus Dreyer	A. Haghighi, J. DeNero and D. Klein Approximate Factoring for A* Search NAACL-HLT 2007
Mar. 29 & Apr. 5	Zhifei Li	H. Daume III, J. Langford, and D. Marcu Search-based structured prediction. Machine Learning Journal, forthcoming
Mar. 8	David Smith	H. Daume III & D. Marcu Learning as search optimization: approximate large margin methods for structured prediction. ICML 2005
Mar. 1	Wei Chen	M. Kaisser, S. Scheible, and B. Webber Experiments at the University of Edinburgh for the TREC 2006 QA track. TREC-15	They do some fairly deep interpretation of sentences, extracting their predicate-argument structure.
Feb. 22	Eric Harley	K. Kan Lo & W. Lam Using Semantic Relations with World Knowledge for Question Answering TREC-15
Feb. 15	Nikhil Bojja	C. Monson et. al. Unsupervised Induction of Natural Language Morphology Inflection Classes ACL Student Workshop '04
Feb. 8	Delip Rao	P. Schone and D. Jurafsky Knowledge-free induction of morphology using latent semantic analysis CoNLL 2000	However, there was an extension of this work reported in NAACL-2001 that looks at circumfixes and prefix/affix combinations. [1]
Feb. 1	Nikesh Garera	D. Yarowsky and R. Wicentowski Minimally supervised morphological analysis by multimodal alignment ACL 2000	For more details refer to Chapter 4 of Wicentowski's thesis.

Fall 2006

Date/Time	Presenter	Paper(s)	Supporting Papers/Notes
Dec. 13	Delip Rao	J. Carbonell et. al. Context-based machine translation AMTA 2006
Dec. 6	Jason Smith	M. Galley et. al. Scalable Inference and Training of Context-Rich Syntactic Translation Models ACL 2006	It may also be helpful to look at: M. Galley et. al. What's in a translation rule? HLT/NAACL 2004
Nov. 29	Balakrishnan V	D. Marcu et. al. SPMT: Statistical Machine Translation with Syntactified Target Language Phrases EMNLP 2006
Nov. 15	Eric Harley	D. Chiang An introduction to synchronous grammars ACL 2006 Tutorial	Slides from the talk are also available. [2]
Nov. 8	Elliott Drabek	K.Shklovsky A Grammatical Sketch of Petalcingo Tzeltal Undergraduate Thesis, Reed College, 2005	It is 77 pages long, but not dense, and I will be skipping the following sections: Pages 01-14 Phonetics and phonology 18-18 Polyvalence 21-21 Inherent possession and ... 46-55 Tense and aspect and other sections
Nov. 1	Yi Su	M. Steedman Gapping as Constituent Coordination Linguistics and Philosophy, Vol. 13, 1990, pp.207-264.	See Yi for photocopies.
Oct. 25	Markus Dreyer	S. Reizler et. al. Parsing the Wall Street Journal using a Lexical-Functional Grammar and Discriminative Estimation Techniques ACL 2002
Oct. 18	Erin Fitzgerald	J. Bresnan & R.M. Kaplan Lexical-Functional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Representation The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, MIT Press, 1982	BTW, the edited collection that this appears in is generally interesting. Bresnan defends and develops lexicalized grammars in general; the idea of separate surface and semantic roles; and Bresnan & Kaplan's LFG in particular. You should know that she originated (in 1978) the extremely influential idea of lexicalized syntax -- the idea that a grammar is simply a collection of lexical entries to be assembled in standard language-independent ways, but that there are also "lexical redundancy rules" that relate, e.g., active and passive entries for the same verb. Some chapters address morphological and cognitive issues pertaining to lexicalization, including an essay by Pinker on lexicalist learning. Slides from Erin's presentation can be found here.
Oct. 11	John Blatz	L.Xu, D. Wilkinson, F. Southey, & D. Schuurmans Discriminative Unsupervised Learning of Structured Predictors ICML 2006
Oct. 4	Nikesh Garera	A. Culotta & J. Sorensen Dependency Tree Kernels for Relation Extraction ACL 2004 D. Zelenko, C. Aone, & A. Richardella Kernel Methods for Relation Extraction JMLR, Volume 3, 2003
Sept. 27	David Smith	C. Cortes, P. Haffner, & M. Mohri Rational Kernels NIPS 2003	Papers extending rational kernels, including results on positive semidefinite cases, are at:[3] For the record, and not to be read, is an interesting parallel line of research in Fisher Kernels over strings, e.g. this paper by Saunders, Shawe-Taylor and Vinokourov: [4]
Sept. 20	Elliot Drabek	K.Q. Weinberger, F. Sha, & L.K. Saul Learning a kernel matrix for nonlinear dimensionality reduction ICML 2004	S.T. Roweis & L.K. Saul Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction by Locally Linear Embedding Science, 22 December 2000 J.B. Tenenbaum, V. De Silva, & J.C. Langford A global geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction Science, 22 December 2000
Sept. 13	Roy Tromble	L. Xu, J. Neufeld, B. Larson, & D. Schuurmans Maximum Margin Clustering NIPS 2004

Summer 2006

Date/Time	Presenter	Paper(s)	Supporting Papers/Notes
ddd

Fall 2002

Date/Time	Presenter	Paper(s)	Supporting Papers/Notes
ddd

Summer 2002

Date/Time	Presenter	Paper(s)	Supporting Papers/Notes
July. 24	Michelle Vanni	Merlo A Multilingual Paradigm for Automatic Verb Classification ACL '02
July. 31	Paola Virga	Yamada, Knight A decoder for Syntax-based Statistical MT ACL '02

Spring 2002

Date/Time	Presenter	Paper(s)	Supporting Papers/Notes
Feb. 7	Paola Virga	Knight, Graehl Machine Transliteration Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Eighth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Feb. 14	Charles Schafer	Yaser, Germann Translating with Scarce Resources American Association for Arti�cial Intelligence 2000
Feb. 21	Jia Cui	Barzilay, McKeown Extracting Paraphrases from a Parallel Corpus Computer Science Department Columbia.Univ.
Feb. 28	Silviu Cucerzan	Marcu Towards a Unified Approach to Memory- and Statistical-Based Machine Translation. Annual Meeting of the ACL, Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics '2001
Mar. 14	Noah A. Smith	Ratnaparkhi A Simple Introduction to Maximum Entropy Models for NLP Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, Univ. of Penn.
Mar. 28	Swapna Somasundaran	Crestan, El-Beze Improving supervised WSD by including rough semantic features in a Multilevel view of the Context SEMPRO Workshop, Edinburgh, 2001.
Apr. 11	Paola Virga	Neal, Hinton A view of the EM algorithm that justifies incremental, sparse, and other variants Learning in Graphical Models, 1999
Apr. 18	Paul Ruhlen	NA. Rao, K. Rose Deterministically annealed design of hidden Markov model speech recognizers IEEE Trans. on Speech and Audio Processing, vol. 9, (no. 2), Feb. 2001	following article builds on the Neal & Hinton paper that we read last week. It tests an incremental version of EM (carefully choosing how incremental it will be), as well as a "lazy EM" version that visits "significant" cases more often. [5]
Apr. 25	Paul Ruhlen	H. Al-Adhaileh, Kong, Melamed Malay-English Bitext Mapping and Alignment Using SIMR/GSA Algorithms Malaysian National Conference on Research and Development on Lingustics '2001

Fall 2001

Date/Time	Presenter	Paper(s)	Supporting Papers/Notes
Dec. 14	Jia Cui	Bellegarda Exploiting latent semantic information in statistical language models Proceedings of the IEEE , Volume: 88 Issue: 8 , Aug. 2000
Nov. 29	Silviu Cucerzan	Mike Collins, Yoram Singer Unsupervised Models for Named Entity Classification EMNLP/VLC'99
Nov. 20	Radu Florian	Blum, Mitchell Combining Labeled and Unlabeled Data with Co-Training Proceedings of 1998 Conference on Computational Learning Theory
Nov. 16	Richard Wicentowski	Eisner, Satta Efficient parsing for bilexical context-free grammars and head automaton grammars ACL '99	plagiarism detection systems might be relevant to bitext alignment. A message to the Corpora list yesterday announced the following review paper:[6]
Nov. 2	Paul Ruhlen	Manning, Schuetze Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Section 14 on clustering, pp. 495-527. MIT Press
Oct. 26	Gideon Mann	Tishby, Pereira, Bialek The information bottleneck method	The paper describes a clustering method which is a generalization of their earlier work on "Distributional Clustering of English Words" (pereira,tishby and lee '93).