Chris Brockett
COMPUTATIONAL LINGUIST
.
About Me
I am a computational linguist in the Natural Language Processing Group.
I am multitasking on projects that range from web-based editorial assistance for English learners and native speakers, summarization, and acquisition of paraphrase and semantically similar terms for search and other applications. One important current project is the Microsoft Research ESL Assistant, the prototype of which is now available online. An outline of this project can be found on the ESL Assistant team page. Updated information is also provided from time to time on the ESL Assistant team blog ESL Assistant News & Notes on MSDN.
I started work at Microsoft Research in 1996, beginning by developing the lexical and morphological components of our group's natural language processing system for Japanese. Later I helped with the the first version of the MSR-MT English-Japanese machine translation system used to translate Microsoft Knowledge Base articles. In various previous metamorphoses prior to Microsoft, I have worked as a professional translator in Japan and taught Japanese language and linguistics at the University of Washington.
Academic Background
- Ph.D. Linguistics. 1991. Cornell University
- M.A. Modern Japanese Literature. 1979. Waseda University, Japan
- B.A. Japanese and Chinese Language and Literature. 1973. University of Auckland, New Zealand
Publications
2009
- Claudia Leacock, Michael Gamon, and Chris Brockett, User Input and Interactions on Microsoft Research ESL Assistant, ACL/SIGPARSE, June 2009
- 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
2008
- 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
2007
- Chris Brockett, ALIGNING THE RTE 2006 CORPUS, no. MSR-TR-2007-77, June 2007
- Kristina Toutanova, Chris Brockett, Michael Gamon, Jagadeesh Jagarlamundi, Hisami Suzuki, and Lucy Vanderwende, The Pythy Summarization System: Microsoft Research at DUC 2007, Association for Computational Linguistics, April 2007
- Lucy Vanderwende, Hisami Suzuki, Chris Brockett, and Ani Nenkova, Beyond SumBasic: Task-Focused Summarization with Sentence Simplification and Lexical Expansion, in Information Processing and Management, Volume 43 , Issue 6, pages 1606-1618 , 2007
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
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
- 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
2004
- 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
2002
- Chris Brockett, Takako Aikawa, Anthony Aue, Arul Menezes, Chris Quirk, and Hisami Suzuki, English-Japanese Example-Based Machine Translation Using Abstract Semantic Representations, International Conference on Computational Linguistics, October 2002
2001
- Eric Brill, Gary Kacmarcik, and Chris Brockett, Automatically Harvesting Katakana-English Term Pairs from Search Engine Query Logs, Asia Federation of Natural Language Processing, November 2001
- Simon Corston-Oliver, Michael Gamon, and Chris Brockett, A Machine Learning Approach to the Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation, Association for Computational Linguistics, January 2001
2000
- Gary Kacmarcik, Chris Brockett, and Hisami Suzuki, Robust Segmentation of Japanese Text into a Lattice for Parsing, DFKI GmbH, August 2000
- Hisami Suzuki, Chris Brockett, and Gary Kacmarcik, Using a Broad-Coverage Parser for Word-Breaking in Japanese, DFKI GmbH, August 2000
Older Work
- The View from Cognitive Neuroscience. In Hiroshi Nara and Mari Noda (eds.) Acts of Reading: Exploring Connections in Pedagogy of Japanese. University of Hawai'i Press. 2002. (Extensively revised version of paper presented at Association of Japanese Teachers workshop in 1994.)
- Washington State Japanese Language Guidelines Committee (eds.). A Communicative Framework for Introductory Japanese Language Curricula. Technical Report #20. Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center,
University of Hawai'i at Manoa. 2000. Revised edition of A Communicative Framework for Introductory Japanese Language Curricula in Washington State High Schools. Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1994. (Lead author) - Mo: Quantificational Evidence for a Non-Quantificational Analysis. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics: Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics I 1995.
- The Syntax of Generics: Japanese Evidence for the Quantificational Model. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. 1990.
