Research Interests
- MindNet: automated acquisition of semantic knowledge
- Summarization, focusing on summary generation and evaluation
Background
Lucy's research focuses on text understanding. She is deeply involved with developing MindNet, a method for automatically acquiring semantic information. All types of semantic information can be identified in and extracted from text. Dictionaries can provide the semantic information, for example, that a sheep is an animal; encyclopedias provide specific knowledge, for example, that Armstrong landed on the moon. Specialized data sets provide information on a given topic, for example, that Microsoft Research was founded in 1991. Common sense information can also be extracted from web-scale resources. Such information can be extracted in a variety of ways, from rule-based to completely unsupervised. Currently, Lucy's focus is to work with applications that demonstrate how the information in a knowledge resource such as MindNet can be used to improve human understanding and productivity.
Lucy holds a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Georgetown University, in Washington D.C. Lucy worked at IBM Bethesda on natural language processing from 1988 - 1990. In 1991, she was a Visiting Scientist at the Institute for Systems Science in Singapore. Lucy has worked at Microsoft Research since 1992.
Current links
Consider participating in, and attending, the NAACL HLT 2009 conference, May 31 - June 5, 2009 in Boulder, Colorado. Short paper submission deadline: February 9, 2009 (details on the NAACL HLT 2009 website)
Click here for full list of publications
- Lucy Vanderwende, Answering and Questioning for Machine Reading, American Association for Artificial Intelligence , March 2007
- Kristina Toutanova, Chris Brockett, Michael Gamon, Jagadeesh Jagarlamundi, Hisami Suzuki, and Lucy Vanderwende, The Pythy Summarization System: Microsoft Research at DUC 2007, in Proceedings of DUC-2007, Association for Computational Linguistics, April 2007
- Ani Nenkova, Lucy Vanderwende, and Kathleen McKeown, A compositional context sensitive multi-document summarizer: exploring the factors that influence summarization, in Proceedings of SIGIR 2006, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2006
- Rion Snow, Lucy Vanderwende, and Arul Menezes, Effectively using syntax for recognizing false entailment, Association for Computational Linguistics, May 2006
- William B. Dolan, Stephen D. Richardson, and Lucy Vanderwende, MindNet: acquiring and structuring semantic information from text, no. MSR-TR-98-23, May 1998
- Simonetta Montemagni and Lucy Vanderwende, Structural Patterns vs. String Patterns for Extracting Semantic Information from Dictionaries, in Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics, 1992