My undergraduate degree is from UC Berkeley, and my Ph.D. is from UCLA Linguistics . I joined MSR in 1992, and most of my work since then has focused on semantic processing. I am also deeply involved in our group's machine translation effort (see our MT blog and the and Live Translator homepage), as well as the Microsoft Research ESL Assistant project, which helps non-native speakers write better English by showing them targeted usage examples culled from the web. For more details on this project, see our project site and blog .
During the 1990s I was preoccupied with building richly structured semantic networks from text data as part of the MindNet project. This work spurred my interest in "the paraphrase problem": when do superficially dissimilar strings of words convey essentially the same meaning?
Learning to identify and generate such paraphrase alternations is key to developing applications that appear to understand human language, and we've done some interesting work in this area . I have also been active in helping establishing the Recognizing Textual Entailment challenges , which address a closely related problem.
- Michael Gamon, Claudia Leacock, Chris Brockett, William B. Dolan, Jianfeng Gao, Dmitriy Belenko, and Alexandre Klementiev, Using Statistical Techniques and Web Search to Correct ESL Errors, in Calico Journal, Vol 26, No. 3, CALICO Journal, June 2009
- Michael Gamon, Jianfeng Gao, Chris Brockett, Alexander Klementiev, William Dolan, Dmitriy Belenko, and Lucy Vanderwende, Using Contextual Speller Techniques and Language Modeling for ESL Error Correction. Proceedings of IJCNLP, Hyderabad, India. , Asia Federation of Natural Language Processing, January 2008
- Lucy Vanderwende and William B. Dolan, What syntax can contribute in entailment task, Springer-Verlag, June 2006
- Chris Brockett, William B. Dolan, and Michael Gamon, Correcting ESL Errors Using Phrasal SMT Techniques, in 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the ACL, Sydney, Australia, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2006
- Chris Brockett and William B. Dolan, Support Vector Machines for Paraphrase Identification and Corpus Construction, in Third International Workshop on Paraphrasing (IWP2005), Asia Federation of Natural Language Processing, 2005
- William B. Dolan and Chris Brockett, Automatically Constructing a Corpus of Sentential Paraphrases, in Third International Workshop on Paraphrasing (IWP2005), Asia Federation of Natural Language Processing, 2005
- William Dolan, Chris Quirk, and Chris Brockett, Unsupervised Construction of Large Paraphrase Corpora: Exploiting Massively Parallel News Sources, International Conference on Computational Linguistics, August 2004
- Chris Quirk, Chris Brockett, and William B. Dolan, Monolingual Machine Translation for Paraphrase Generation, Association for Computational Linguistics, July 2004
- William B. Dolan, Jessie Pinkham, Stephen D. Richardson, and Arul Menezes, Achieving commercial-quality translation with example-based methods, European Association for Machine Translation, September 2001
- William Dolan, Stephen D. Richardson, Arul Menezes, and Monica Corston-Oliver, Overcoming the customization bottleneck using example-based MT, Association for Computational Linguistics, July 2001
- William Dolan, Lucy Vanderwende, and Stephen D. Richardson, Polysemy in a Broad-Coverage Natural Language Processing System, Oxford University Press, July 2000
- Simon Corston-Oliver and William B. Dolan, Less is More: Eliminating index terms for subordinate clauses, no. MSR-TR-99-51, July 1999
- William B. Dolan, Stephen D. Richardson, and Lucy Vanderwende, MindNet: acquiring and structuring semantic information from text, no. MSR-TR-98-23, May 1998
- William B. Dolan, Metaphor as an Emergent Property of Machine-Readable Dictionaries, no. MSR-TR-95-11, March 1995
- William B. Dolan, Word Sense Ambiguation: Clustering Related Senses, no. MSR-TR-94-18, August 1994
- William B. Dolan, Exploiting Lexical Information for Visual Processing, no. MSR-TR-96-10, May 1994
- William Dolan, Stephen D. Richardson, and Lucy Vanderwende, Combining Dictionary-Based and Example-Based Methods for Natural Language Analysis , no. MSR-TR-93-08, June 1993
- William Dolan, Stephen D. Richardson, and Lucy Vanderwende, Automatically Deriving Structured Knowledge Bases From On-Line Dictionaries, no. MSR-TR-93-07, May 1993
