COLING-ACL 2006 WORKSHOP INFORMATION

The Task-Focused Summarization and Question Answering Workshop Program is now available.

Information about the Task-Focused Summarization and Question Answering Workshop (Coling/ACL 2006 WS7), here.

Multilingual Multi-document Summarization Evaluation

Information about the Multilingual Multi-document Evaluation, a shared task held in conjunction with the Task-focused Summarization and Question Answering Workshop, here.

Lucy Vanderwende is a Researcher in the Natural Language Processing Unit.

Research Interests

• MindNet: automated acquisition of semantic knowledge
• multi-document summarization, focusing on summary generation and evaluation

Community Particpation

• Entailment, participation in the Recognizing Textual Entailment workshop. The Microsoft Research RTE2 submission (MENT) available here. A system description will be available in the RTE2 workshop proceedings, link to be added when available. System presentation at the RTE2 workshop is available here

Background

Lucy's research focuses on text understanding. Her main work involves 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. Currently, Lucy's focus is to develop applications that demonstrate how computer text understanding can be used to improve human understanding and productivity.

Lucy holds a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Georgetown University, in Washington D.C. Previously, Lucy worked at IBM Bethesda on natural language processing. In 1991, she was a Visiting Scientist at the Institute for Systems Science in Singapore.

Publications

• Vanderwende, Lucy, and Hisami Suzuki. 2005. Frequency-based Summarizer and a Language Modeling Extension. In MultiLingual Summarization 2005 Workshop Proceedings (only available online)

• Vanderwende, Lucy, Deborah Coughlin, and William Dolan. 2005. What Syntax can Contribute in Entailment Task. In Proceedings of the PASCAL CHallenges Workshop for Recognizing Textual Entailment. Southampton, U.K.

• Vanderwende, Lucy. 2005. Volunteers Created the Web. In Proceedings of the AAAI 2005 Spring Symposium Series, working notes of the symposium on Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors. Stanford, CA.

• Vanderwende, Lucy, Michele Banko, and Arul Menezes. 2004. Event-centric Summary Generation. In Document Understanding Conference at HLT-NAACL. Boston, MA.

• Banko, Michele and Lucy Vanderwende. 2004. Using N-Grams to Understand the Nature of Summaries. In Proceedings of HLT/NAACL 2004. Boston, MA.

• Banko, Michele and Lucy Vanderwende. 2004. Discovering Subjectivity Using Multi-document Summaries. In Proceedings of the AAAI 2004 Spring Symposium Series, working notes of the symposium on Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text. (Poster)

• Ringger, Eric, Robert C. Moore, Eugene Charniak, Lucy Vanderwende, and Hisami Suzuki. May 2004. "Using the Penn Treebank to Evaluate Non-Treebank Parsers." In Proceedings of the 2004 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Lisbon, Portugal.

• Dolan, William, Lucy Vanderwende, and Stephen Richardson. 2000. Polysemy in a Broad-Coverage Natural Language Processing System. In Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches. Ravin, Y. and Leacock, C., eds., Oxford University Press.

• Richardson, Stephen D., Dolan, William B., and Vanderwende, Lucy 1998. MindNet: acquiring and structuring semantic information from text. In Proceedings of COLING '98, to appear.

• Vanderwende, L. 1995. Ambiguity in the acquisition of lexical information. In Proceedings of the AAAI 1995 Spring Symposium Series, working notes of the symposium on representation and acquisition of lexical knowledge, 174-179.

• Vanderwende, L. 1995. The Analysis of Noun Sequences using Semantic Information Extracted from On-Line Dictionaries. Ph.D. thesis , Georgetown University, 312 pages.

• Vanderwende, L. 1994. Algorithm for automatic interpretation of noun sequences. In Proceedings of COLING94, 782-788.

• Pentheroudakis, J.P., and L. Vanderwende. 1993. Automatically identifying morphological relations in machine-readable dictionaries. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the UW Centre for the New OED and Text Research, 114-131.

• Richardson, S., L. Vanderwende, and W. Dolan. 1993. Combining Dictionary-based and Example-based Methods for Natural Language Analysis.. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation, Kyoto, Japan. pp 69-79.

• Dolan, William B., L. Vanderwende, and S. Richardson. 1993. Automatically Deriving Structured Knowledge Base from On-line Dictionaries. In Proceedings of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics, April 21-24, 1993, Vancouver, British Columbia.

• Montemagni, S., and L. Vanderwende. 1992. Structural Patterns vs. string patterns for extracting semantic information from dictionaries. In Proceedings of COLING92, 546-552.