rada mihalcea
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research
interests . projects . activities . invited talks . tutorials . workshops



research group
My research group is the Language and Information Technologies group (LIT@UNT). Our work is funded by the National Science Foundation, Google, and the Texas Advanced Research Program.


research interests
My research interests are in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Information Retrieval. I am currently working on:
  • Lexical Semantics (including: semantic similarity, word sense disambiguation, lexical substitution)
  • Graph-based Algorithms for Natural Language Processing (with applications to text summarization, word sense disambiguation, keyphrase extraction, category assignment)
  • Multilingual Natural Language Processing, Parallel Texts
  • Multilingual Sentiment and Subjectivity Analysis
  • Computational Humour


    awards
  • National Science Foundation CAREER award, 2008
  • Who's Who in America, 2008, 2009. Who's Who of American Women 2008-2009.
  • Best paper award, second place, International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, 2007.
  • Best paper award, International Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society, 2000.
  • Best paper award, International Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society, 1999.
  • National Mathematics Olympiads, Romania, 1986, 1987, 1990.


    current research projects
    Automatic Semantic Interpretation semantic interpretation with monolingual and cross-lingual evidence
    TextRank graph-based ranking algorithms for text processing
    Sentiment and Subjectivity Analysis multilingual sentiment and subjectivity analysis
    Babylon methods for building and exploiting parallel texts
    Resources for word / sentence alignment
    Computational Humor computational approaches for humour recognition and generation
    Text-to-image Synthesis language processing models for text-to-image synthesis and automatic image annotation


    previous research projects
    SenseLearner tools for finding the meaning of all words in unrestricted text
    Teach-Computers data collection with volunteer contributions over the Web
    SPOT semantic parsing for open text


    current activities
  • Journal of Natural Language Engineering (2007-2011)
  • Research on Language and Computation (2007-2011)
  • Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning editorial board (2006-present)
  • John Benjamins series on Natural Language Processing, advisory board
  • SIGNLL board member (2002-present)
  • Senseval/Semeval advising committee (2004-present)


    past activities
  • SIGLEX president (2004-2007)
  • Computational Linguistics editorial board (2005-2007)
  • Language Resources and Evaluation editorial board (2005-2006)
  • Guest editor for NLE Special Issue on Parallel Texts, 2005 (with Michel Simard)


    recent invited talks
  • keynote at the ACL workshop The People's Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources , Singapore, August 2009.
  • Computational Linguistics group, University of Texas at Austin, March 9, 2009.
  • Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge, Education Testing Services, Princeton, NJ, September 5, 2008.
  • Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge: Using Wikipedia as a Source of Linguistic Evidence, Dublin City University, February 8, 2008.
  • keynote at the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence, Tubingen, Germany, February 1, 2008.
  • Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge: Using Wikipedia as a Source of Linguistic Evidence, University of Toronto, January 30, 2008.
  • Learning Multilingual Subjective Language via Cross-Lingual Projections, Columbia University, New York, September 2007.
  • The Language of Humour, keynote at the Workshop on Cross-lingual Information Processing, Camogli, Italy, July 2007.
  • Using Wikipedia for Word Sense Disambiguation, keynote at the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering Principles and Techniques, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, June 2007.
  • Measures of Text Semantic Similarity, Sussex University, Brighton, United Kingdom, May 17, 2007.
  • A Picture is Worth Seven Thousand Words: Toward Communicating Simple Sentences using Pictorial Representations, Turing Center, Washington University, Seattle, Washington, April 17, 2007.
  • A Picture is Worth Seven Thousand Words: Toward Communicating Simple Sentences using Pictorial Representations, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City, March 20, 2007.
  • The Language of Humour, keynote at the NAACL workshop on Computational Approaches to Figurative Language, Rochester, NY, April 26, 2007.
  • Building Multilingual and Crosslingual Semantic Resources with Volunteer Contributions over the Web, invited presentation at the workshop on ``Multi-lingual semantic annotation: Theory and applications'', Saarland University, Saarbrucken, Germany, June 23, 2006.
  • Measures of Text Semantic Similarity, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, June 16, 2006.
  • Measures of Text Semantic Similarity, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK, June 2006.
  • Random Walks on Text Structures, keynote at the International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, CICLing, Mexico City, Mexico, February 2006.
  • Text Processing with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica Optica y Electronica (INAOE), Puebla, Mexico, September 6, 2005.
  • Text Processing with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, University of Ottawa, TAMALE Research Day, Ottawa, Canada, May 25, 2005.
  • Graph-based Algorithms for Text Processing, University of Memphis, Memphis, March 17, 2005.
  • Random Walks on Text Structures, University of Texas, Forum for Artificial Intelligence, Austin, February 24, 2005.
  • Using Your Algorithm to Solve My Problems, Google, Sunnyvale, December 16, 2004.
  • Making Sense Out of the Web, keynote at Lexical Resources and the Web for Word Sense Disambiguation, IBERAMIA, Puebla, Mexico, November 22, 2004.
  • Text Processing with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, School of Libraries and Information Sciences, UNT, November 3, 2004.
  • Graph-Theory Meets Computational Linguistics: Text Processing with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, keynote at EsTAL 2004, Alicante, Spain, October 21, 2004.
  • Text Summarization with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, Microsoft Research, Seattle, September 10, 2004.
  • Text Summarization with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, Xerox Research Center Europe, Grenoble, France, August 20, 2004.
  • Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation using Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, Istituto Trentino di Coltura ITC/IRST, Trento, Italy, August 4, 2004.
  • Graph-based Ranking Algorithms for Language Processing, USC/ISI, April 16, 2004 [abstract]
  • The Quest for Meaning, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science, August 23, 2003.
  • The Web as Collective Mind: Building Large Annotated Corpora with Web Users' Help, invited presentation at the 1st Meaning Workshop, San Sebastian, Basque Country, April 11-12, 2003.
  • Using the Web for Word Sense Disambiguation, University of Minnesota, Duluth, October 24, 2002 [abstract]
  • Efficient Data Driven Methods for Word Sense Disambiguation, University of Ottawa, March 11, 2002 [abstract]


    tutorials
  • Words, meanings, and Emotions, tutorial at the Eurolan Summer School, Iasi, Romania, August 2007 (with Carlo Strapparava).
  • Graph-based Algorithms for Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing, tutorial at RANLP 2005 Borovetz Bulgaria September 2005, HLT-NAACL 2006 New York City June 2006 (with Drago Radev).
  • How to add a new language on the NLP map, tutorial at EUROLAN 2005, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, August 2005 (with Vivi Nastase, Doina Tatar), IJCNLP 2008, Hyderabad, India, 2008.
  • Advances in Word Sense Disambiguation (with Ted Pedersen), tutorial at IBERAMIA 2004 Puebla Mexico November 2004, ACL 2005 Ann Arbor June 2005, AAAI 2005 Pittsburgh July 2005.


    workshops
  • IJCAI 2009 workshop on User-contributed knowledge and artificial intelligence, an evolving synergy, Pasadena, July 2009. (with Razvan Bunescu, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Vivi Nastase)
  • AAAI 2008 Workshop on Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy (WIKIAI-08), Chicago, July 2008. (with Razvan Bunescu, Evgeniy Gabrilovich)
  • NAACL 2007 workshop on Textgraphs: Graph-based Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, Rochester, April 2007. (with Chris Biemann, Irina Matveeva, Drago Radev)
  • NAACL 2006 workshop on Textgraphs: Graph-based Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, New York City, June 2006. (with Drago Radev)
  • ACL 2005 workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data Driven Machine Translation and Beyond, Ann Arbor, July 2005. (with Philipp Koehn, Joel Martin, Christof Monz, Ted Pedersen)
  • AAAI 2005 Spring Symposium on Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors, March 2005. (with Timothy Chklovski, Pedro Domingos, Henry Lieberman, Push Singh)
  • Senseval-3, "3rd International Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for the Semantic Analysis of Text", ACL, Barcelona, July 2004. (with Phil Edmonds)
  • HLT-NAACL 2003 Workshop on "Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data Driven Machine Translation and Beyond", Edomonton, May 2003. (with Ted Pedersen)
  • ACL 2002 Workshop on "Word Sense Disambiguation: Recent Advances and Future Directions", Philadelphia, July 2002. (with Phil Edmonds)


    recent program committees
  • ACL 2009 (area chair), NAACL 2009, EACL 2009, HCI India 2009, Cicling 2009, CoNLL 2009, ICWSM 2009.
  • EMNLP 2008, ACL 2008, LREC 2008, Coling 2008, CoNLL 2008, AAAI 2008, ICSC 2008, Cicling 2008, GWN 2008, ICWSM 2008.
  • Eurolan Doctoral Consortium 2007, EMNLP 2007, ACL 2007, AAAI 2007, NAACL 2007, Cicling 2007, Flairs 2007, ICWSM 2007.
  • EMNLP 2006 (area chair), LinkKDD 2006, ACL 2006, AAAI 2006, HLT/NAACL 2006, Cicling 2006, EACL 2006, AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium on Weblogs, Flairs 2006 track on Trends in NLP
  • HLT/EMNLP 2005, LinkKDD 2005, CoNLL 2005, AAAI 2005 (doctoral consortium), RANLP 2005, IJCAI 2005 (poster session, senior PC), ACL 2005, ACL 2005 (poster & demos) , AAAI-KCVC 2005, Cicling 2005, Flairs 2005
  • EMNLP 2004, NIPS 2004, Coling 2004, ACL 2004 (area chair) , IBERAMIA 2004 - WSD workshop CoNLL 2004, LREC 2004, Flairs 2004, Cicling 2004
  • DC-KCAP 2003, NIPS 2003, RANLP 2003, ACL 2003, CoNLL 2003, EACL 2003, EACL 2003 (research notes), FLAIRS 2003