1. Owen Rambow
6 Minutes

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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?

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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)