Robert C. Moore is a Principal Researcher in the Natural Language Processing Group of Microsoft Research.

Background and Interests

Bob Moore joined Microsoft Research in 1999. Previously, he was Director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS) at NASA Ames Research Center. Prior to that, he held a series of positions with SRI International, including founding and serving as the first Director of SRI's Computer Science Research Centre in Cambridge, England; being Director of SRI's Natural-Language Research Program in Menlo Park, California; and concluding his career at SRI as Principal Scientist in the Natural-Language Research Program.

His research has ranged widely within artificial intelligence, natural-language processing, and computational linguistics. His early work focussed on knowledge representation and automated reasoning, and included the invention of autoepistemic logic. Subsequently he has concentrated on natural-language processing and computational linguistics, including natural-language semantics, parsing and generation, and speech understanding. His current work focusses on applications of machine learning and statistical modeling to natural-language processing, particularly in the context of machine translation.

He received all his post-secondary education at MIT, culminating in a PhD in Artificial Intelligence in 1979. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, an associate editor of Computational Intelligence, and a former member of the editorial boards of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. In 2006 he was general chair of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Available Software

• Bilingual Sentence Aligner When people translate documents from one language to another, not all sentences are translated one-for-one. This Perl code implements an algorithm for finding which sentences do translate one-for-one in a parallel bilingual corpus.
• Context-Free Parsing Algorithms Reference implementations in Perl 5 of several parsing algorithms for context-free grammars.
• Unification Grammar Sentence Realization Algorithms Prolog implementations of two versions of the unfication grammar sentence realization aglorithm described in "A Complete, Efficient Sentence Realization Algorithm for Unification Grammar," appearing in the Proceedings of the International Natural Language Generation Conference, INLG'02, plus other associated code and data files.

Recent Publications

2007

• Moore, Robert C., and Chris Quirk. 2007. Faster Beam-Search Decoding for Phrasal Statistical Machine Translation. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 321-327.
• Moore, Robert C., and Chris Quirk. 2007. An Iteratively-Trained Segmentation-Free Phrase Translation Model for Statistical Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 112-119.
• Zettlemoyer, Luke, and Robert Moore. 2007. Selective Phrase Pair Extraction for Improved Statistical Machine Translation. In Human Language Technologies 2007: The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; Companion Volume, Short Papers, Rochester, New York, pp. 209-212.

2006

• Moore, Robert C., Wen-tau Yih, and Andreas Bode. 2006. Improved Discriminative Bilingual Word Alignment. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney, Australia, pp. 513-520.

2005

• Moore, Robert C. 2005. A Discriminative Framework for Bilingual Word Alignment. In Proceedings, Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Vancouver, British Columbia, pp. 81-88.
• Moore, Robert C. 2005. Association-Based Bilingual Word Alignment. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts, Ann Arbor, Michigan, pp. 1-8.

2004

• Moore, Robert C. 2004. On Log-likelihood-Ratios and the Significance of Rare Events. In Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 333-340.
• Moore, Robert C. 2004. Improving IBM Word Alignment Model 1. In Proceedings, 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 519-526.
• Moore, Robert C. 2004. Improved Left-Corner Chart Parsing for Large Context-Free Grammars. In New Developments in Parsing Technology, Bunt, Carroll, and Satta (eds.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 185-201. Revised version of a paper appearing in Proceedings, Sixth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2000), ACL/SIGPARSE, Trento, Italy, pp. 171-182.
• Aue, Anthony, Arul Menezes, Bob Moore, Chris Quirk and Eric Ringger. 2004. Statistical Machine Translation Using Labeled Semantic Dependency Graphs. In Proceedings, The Tenth Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation (TMI 2004), Baltimore, Maryland, pp. 125-134.
• Banko, Michele and Robert C. Moore. 2004. Part of Speech Tagging in Context. In Proceedings, 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2004), Geneva, Switzerland, pp. 556-561.
• Ringger, Eric, Michael Gamon, Robert C. Moore, David Rojas, Martine Smets, and Simon Corston-Oliver. 2004. Linguistically Informed Statistical Models of Constituent Structure for Ordering in Sentence Realization. In Proceedings, 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2004), Geneva, Switzerland, pp. 673-679.
• Ringger, Eric, Robert C. Moore, Eugene Charniak, Lucy Vanderwende, and Hisami Suzuki. 2004. Using the Penn Treebank to Evaluate Non-Treebank Parsers. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 867-870.

2003

• Moore, Robert C. 2003. Learning Translations of Named-Entity Phrases from Parallel Corpora. In Proceedings, 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 259-266.

2002

• Moore, Robert C. 2002. Fast and Accurate Sentence Alignment of Bilingual Corpora. In Machine Translation: From Research to Real Users (Proceedings, 5th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, Tiburon, California), Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, pp. 135-244.
• Moore, Robert C. 2002. A Complete, Efficient Sentence-Realization Algorithm for Unification Grammar. In Proceedings, Second International Natural Language Generation Conference, Harriman, New York, pp. 41-48.
• Corston-Oliver, Simon, Michael Gamon, Eric Ringger, and Robert Moore. 2002. An overview of Amalgam: A machine-learned generation module. In Proceedings, Second International Natural Language Generation Conference, Harriman, New York, pp. 33-40.
• Gamon, Michael, Eric Ringger, Zhu Zhang, Robert Moore, and Simon Corston-Oliver. 2002. Extraposition: A case study in German sentence realization. In Proceedings, 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2002), Taipei, Taiwan, pp. 301-307.
• Gamon, Michael, Eric Ringger, Simon Corston-Oliver, and Robert Moore. 2002. Machine-learned contexts for linguistic operations in German sentence realization. In Proceedings, 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, pp. 25-32.
• Toutanova, Kristina, and Robert C. Moore. 2002. Pronunciation Modeling for Improved Spelling Correction. In Proceedings, 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, pp. 144-151.

2001

• Moore, Robert C. 2001. Towards a Simple and Accurate Statistical Approach to Learning Translation Relationships among Words. In Proceedings, Workshop on Data-driven Machine Translation, 39th Annual Meeting and 10th Conference of the European Chapter, Association for Computational Linguistics, Toulouse, France, pp. 79-86.

2000

• Moore, Robert C. 2000. Removing Left Recursion from Context-Free Grammars. In Proceedings, 1st Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Seattle, Washington, pp. 249-255.
• Moore, Robert C. 2000. Time as a Measure of Parsing Efficiency. In Proceedings, Workshop on Efficiency in Large-Scale Parsing Systems, 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2000), Luxembourg, pp. 23-28.
• Brill, Eric and Robert C. Moore. 2000. An Improved Error Model for Noisy Channel Spelling Correction. In Proceedings, 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong Kong, pp. 286-293.

1999

• Moore, Robert C. 1999. Using Natural-Language Knowledge Sources in Speech Recognition. In Computational Models of Speech Pattern Processing, Ponting (ed.), Springer-Verlag, pp. 304-327.

Selected Earlier Publications

• Moore, Robert C. 1995. Logic and Representation, Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information.
• Moore, Robert C. 1994. Integration of Speech with Natural Language Understanding. In Voice Communication between Humans and Machines, Roe and Wilpon (eds.), National Academy Press, pp. 254-271.
• Dowding, John, Robert Moore, François Andry, and Douglas Moran. 1994. Interleaving Syntax and Semantics in an Efficient Bottom-up Parser. In Proceedings, 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Las Cruces, New Mexico, pp. 110-116.
• Dowding, John, John Mark Gawron, Doug Appelt, John Bear, Lynn Cherny, Robert Moore, and Douglas Moran. 1993. Gemini: A Natural Language System for Spoken-Language Understanding. In Proceedings, 31st Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Columbus, Ohio, pp. 54-61.
• Alshawi, Hiyan, David Carter, Jan van Eijck, Björn Gambäck, Robert C. Moore, Douglas B. Moran, Fernando C. N. Pereira, Stephan G. Pulman, Manny Rayner, and Arnold G. Smith. 1992. The Core Language Engine, The MIT Press.
• Moore, Robert C. 1985. A Formal Theory of Knowledge and Action. In Formal Theories of the Commonsense World, Hobbs and Moore (eds.), Ablex Publishing Corp, pp. 319-358. Reprinted in Logic and Representation, pp. 27-70.
• Moore, Robert C. 1985. Semantical Considerations on Nonmonotonic Logic. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 75-94. Reprinted in Logic and Representation, pp. 123-144.

For a review by Daniel Marcu of Logic and Representation, see Computing Reviews, Vol. 37, No. 5, pages 246-247, May 1996.

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