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.

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.