1. Spring 2005: Ph.D. Annual Progress ReportApril, 14 th, 2005 Ph.D. Annual Progress Report Spring 2005 Chutima Boonthum Co-Advisors: Dr. Shunichi Toida Dr. Irwin Levinstein

2. Spring 2005: Ph.D. Annual Progress ReportApril, 14 th, 2005 2 Research Projects (RA) iSTART: Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking Subcontract from Psychology Department, University of Memphis, TN. Train students on various SERT reading strategies, let them practice by typing explanation, and then analyze the students’ input  Word-Based & LSA RSAT: Reading Strategy Assessment Tool Subcontract from Psychology Department, Northern Illinois University, IL. Assessing the student explanation and/or answer  Word-Based & LSA, possible Topic Model

3. Spring 2005: Ph.D. Annual Progress ReportApril, 14 th, 2005 3 Dissertation Title “iSTART: Paraphrase Recognition” One thing can be said in different ways What are possible ways to paraphrase? Using synonyms Changing Voice – active/passive Changing Part-of-speech Changing sentence structure … How to recognize them? … Passed Candidacy Exam – Feb 13 th, 2004

4. Spring 2005: Ph.D. Annual Progress ReportApril, 14 th, 2005 4 Publications - 1 ACL 2004 – Student Research Workshop iSTART: Paraphrase Recognition July 21 st – 26 th, 2004, Forum Convocation Center, Barcelona, Spain Issues: Was still at the implementation phase ETS has a similar project, called C-RATER, published the end of 2003. Though it was for a short answer, but what that they differ from us! Just too similar. So, new challenging topics are needed !!!

5. Spring 2005: Ph.D. Annual Progress ReportApril, 14 th, 2005 5 Publications - 2 ACL-SIGSEM 2005 Workshop on The Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications Sense Disambiguation on Preposition ‘with’ April 19 th – 21 st, 2005, University of Essex – Colchester, UK Issues: ???

6. Spring 2005: Ph.D. Annual Progress ReportApril, 14 th, 2005 6 Publications - 3 Levinstein, I.B., McNamara, D. S., Boonthum, C., Pillarisetti, S. P., and Yadavalli, K. (2003) Web-Based Intervention for Higher-Order Reading Skills. Proceeding of the ED-MEDIA 2003 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications, 835-841. McNamara, D. S. Levinstein, I. B. & Boonthum, C. (2004). iSTART: Interactive Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinking. Submitted to Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 36, 222- 233. McNamara, D. S., Boonthum, C., Levinstein, I. B. & Millis, K. (in press) Evaluating Self-Explanations in iSTART: Comparing Word-based and LSA Systems In T. Landauer, D.S., McNamara, S. Dennis, & W. Kintsch (Eds.), LSA: A Road to Meaning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. …

7. Spring 2005: Ph.D. Annual Progress ReportApril, 14 th, 2005 7 What Next … Word Sense Disambiguation - Different Prepositions Can the current technique can be applied? Can we develop general rules for all prepositions? … Paraphrase Recognition Recognize different ways of paraphrasing Applying WSD for nouns, verbs, prepositions … Complete Dissertation Implementation & Evaluation Write-up Results/Discussion, & Defense

8. Spring 2005: Ph.D. Annual Progress ReportApril, 14 th, 2005 8 Expected Graduation !!! Spring 2006 !!!