Owen Rambow 6 Minutes

Interests Theory Technologies/Resources Applications Syntax: its representation and computation (TAG), and its relation to discourse, prosody, semantics … Technologies/Resources Generation: sentence planning & realization Dependency parsing Dependency corpora Applications Generation applications (reports) Machine translation Dialog systems Summarization

Thesis (1994) Formal representation for German syntax Issue: combination of fixed and free word-order Solution: use description of trees, not trees (as in TAG) Current syntax interests: Tagalog, Arabic

Generation: Sentence Planning Work with Lyn Walker Issue: choosing syntactic constructions to achieve communicative goals in dialog systems Idea: use machine learning on preference-ranked options Ongoing: multimedia/speech output (with Noémie) Open issue: individual preferences Summarization?

Generation: Realization Joint work with Srinivas Bangalore, John Chen Use of declarative TAG grammar (hand-written or extracted) Approach: stochastic choice on trees using arborescent & linear language models Open issues: factoring of syntactic/lexical choice

Dependency Parsing Joint work with Alexis Nasr, Srinivas Bangalore, John Chen Idea: transform TAG trees into FSMs/FSTs Parse yields dependency tree Parse FSMs CKY-style Or, compose FSTs to a single large FST Open issues: supertagging, probabilistic model, domain adaptation

Corpora PropBank (Penn project): annotation of PTB with predicate-argument structures Verb-specific arg roles, lexicon Project: mapping PropBank to other, more “semantic” forms of annotation (VerbNet, LCS, Prague)