Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Conference and Workshop Proceedings

  • Natalie Parde, Adam Hair, Michalis Papakostas, Konstantinos Tsiakas, Maria Dagioglou, Vangelis Karkaletsis, and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2015). Grounding the meaning of words through vision and interactive gameplay. In Proceedings of the Twenty Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015), pp 1895-1901. Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 25-31, 2015.
  • Karen Mazidi and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2015). Leveraging multiple views of text for automatic question generation. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2015), pp 257-266. Madrid, Spain, June 22–26, 2015.
  • Nishitha Guntakandla and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2015). Modeling Turn-Taking in Human Conversations. In Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium Series on Turn Taking, (AAAI SSS-15), pp 17-22. Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, March 23-25, 2015. Published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI Press), Menlo Park, California.
  • Natalie Parde, Michalis Papakostas, Konstantinos Tsiakas, Maria Dagioglou, Vangelis Karkaletsis and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2015). I Spy: An interactive game-based approach to multimodal robot learning. In Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference Workshop on Knowledge, Skill, and Behavior Transfer in Autonomous Robots, pp 35-41. Austin, Texas, USA, January 25-29, 2015.
  • John Wes Solomon and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Predicting changes in systolic blood pressure in longitudinal patient records. In the Proceedings of the AMIA 2014 Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) workshop on Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data. Washington, D.C., USA, November 14, 2014.
  • Amir H. Kargar B., Ali Mollahosseini, Taylor Struemph, Wilson Pace, Rodney D. Nielsen and Mohammad H. Mahoor. (2014) Automatic measurement of physical mobility in get-up-and-go test using Kinect sensor. In the Proceedings of the 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC'14). Chicago, Illinois, USA, August 26-30, 2014.
  • Xiao Zhang, Ali Mollahosseini, Amir H. Kargar B., Evan Boucher, Richard M. Voyles, Rodney D. Nielsen and Mohammad H. Mahoor. (2014). eBear: An Emotive Bear-Like Robot. In the Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (IEEE RO-MAN 2014). Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom, August 25-29, 2014.
  • Karen Mazidi and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Linguistic Considerations in Automatic Question Generation. In the Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2014), pp 321-326. Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 23-27, 2014. Published by the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL), Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
  • Ruth Wylie, Michelene T.H. Chi, Robert Talbot, Erik Dutilly, Susan Tricket, Brandon Helding, and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Comprehension SEEDING: Providing Real-Time Formative Assessment to Enhance Classroom Discussion. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2014). Boulder, Colorado, USA, June 23-27, 2014.
  • Bandita Sarma, Amitava Das, and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). A Framework for Health Behavior Change Using Companionable Robots. In Proceedings of the 8th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG2014). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,USA, June 19-21, 2014.
  • Natalie Parde and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Design Challenges and Recommendations for Multi-Agent Learning Systems Featuring Teachable Agents. In the Proceedings of the 2nd Annual GIFT Users Symposium (GIFTSym2). Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, June 12-13, 2014.
  • Frank Paiva, James Glenn, Karen Mazidi, Robert Talbot, Ruth Wylie, Michelene Chi, Erik Dutilly, Brandon Helding, MingYu Lin, Susan Trickett and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Comprehension SEEDING: Comprehension through Self Explanation, Enhanced Discussion, and INquiry Generation. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS 2014). Manoa, Hawaii, USA, June 5-9, 2014.
  • Karen Mazidi and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Pedagogical Evaluation of Automatically Generated Questions. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS 2014). Manoa, Hawaii, USA, June 5-9, 2014.
  • Ruth Wylie, Brandon Helding, Robert Talbot, Michelene T.H. Chi, Susan Trickett and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Using Log Data to Predict Response Behaviors in Classroom Discussions. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS 2014). Manoa, Hawaii, USA, June 5-9, 2014.
  • Frank Paiva and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Clustering Constructed Responses for Formative Assessment in Comprehension SEEDING. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Young Researchers Track, (ITS 2014). Manoa, Hawaii, USA, June 5-9, 2014.
  • Xiao Zhang, Mohammad H. Mahoor and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2013). On multi-task learning for facial action unit detection. In the Proceedings of 28th International Conference on Image and Vision Computing New Zealand (IVCNZ 2013). Wellington, New Zealand, November 27-29, 2013.
  • Talbot, R.M., Wylie, R., Barnett, S., Nielsen, R., & Chi, M.T.H (2013). Deploying tablets in middle schools for research and development: Struggles and successes. At the 112th Annual Convention of the School Science and Mathematics Association (SSMA 2013). San Antonio, Texas, November 14-16, 2013.
  • Myroslava O. Dzikovska, Rodney D. Nielsen, Chris Brew, Claudia Leacock, Danilo Giampiccolo, Luisa Bentivogli, Peter Clark, Ido Dagan and Hoa Trang Dang. (2013). SemEval-2013 Task 7: The Joint Student Response Analysis and 8th Recognizing Textual Entailment Challenge. In Proceedings of the Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2013), 7th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2013) Atlanta, Georgia, USA, June 13-14, 2013. Published by the Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Ruth Wylie, Michelene Chi, Robert Talbot and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2013). Comprehension SEEDING: Using technology to enhance self-explanation, classroom discussion, and question generation. At the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). San Francisco, California, USA. April 27–May 1, 2013.
  • Xiao Zhang, Mohammad Mahoor, Daniel Messinger, Richard Voyles and Rodney Nielsen (2013). Modeling the Dynamics of Spontaneous Facial Action Units. In the Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2013). Shanghai, China. April 22-26, 2013.
  • Talbot, R.M., Helding, B., Chi, M.T.H., Nielsen, R., Wylie, R. (2012). Defining a construct for assessing deep learning in middle school physical science. At the 4th Annual iSTEM Symposium on STEM Education. Boulder, Colorado, October 1, 2012.
  • Myroslava Dzikovska, Rodney D. Nielsen, and Chris Brew. (2012). Towards effective tutorial feedback for explanation questions: A dataset and baselines. In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, (NAACL HLT 2012), Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 3-8, 2012. The Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL), Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
  • Brian L. Cairns, Rodney D. Nielsen, James J. Masanz, James H. Martin, Martha S. Palmer, Wayne H. Ward, and Guergana K. Savova. (2011). The MiPACQ clinical question answering system. American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium (AMIA 2011). Washington, D.C., October 22-26, 2011
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, James J. Masanz, James H. Martin, Martha Palmr, Wayne Ward, and Guergana K. Savova. (Submitted). Beyond QA: Collaborative Dialogue for Clinical Research Discovery. American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium (AMIA 2011). October 22-26, 2011. Washington D.C.
  • Heather D. Anderson, Wilson D. Pace, Elias Brandt, Rodney D. Nielsen, David R. West, Richard R. Allen, Anne M. Libby, and Robert J. Valuck. (2011). Methods for enhanced identification and detection of suicidality outcomes in observational comparative effectiveness and safety research. In The Third Symposium on Comparative Effectiveness Research Methods (Methods for Developing and Analyzing Clinically Rich Data for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research). Rockville, Maryland, June 6-7, 2011.
  • Heather Anderson, Wilson D. Pace, Elias Brandt, Rodney D. Nielsen, David R. West, and Robert J. Valuck. (2011). Methods for detecting suicidality outcomes in observational comparative effectiveness and safety studies. At the annual meeting of the New Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit (NCDEU), (National Institute of Mental Health). Boca Raton, Florida, June 13-16, 2011. American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Richard Voyles, Daniel Bolanos, Mohammad Mahoor, Wilson Pace, Katie Siek, and Wayne Ward. (2010). A Platform for Human-Robot Dialog Systems Research. In Proceedings of AAAI Fall Symposium, Dialog with Robots, pp 161-162, Arlington, Virginia, November 11-13, 2010. AAAI Press.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, James Masanz, Philip V. Ogren, Wayne Ward, James Martin, and Guergana K. Savova. (2010). An architecture for complex clinical question answering. In Proceedings of the First Annual ACM International Health Informatics Symposium (IHI 2010), pp 395-399, Arlington, Virginia, November 11-12, 2010. ACM, New York, NY.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, James H. Martin, James Masanz, Wayne Ward, and Guergana Savova. (Submitted). Characterizing Clinical Questions and Question Answering Systems. American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium (AMIA 2010). November 13-17, 2010. Washington D.C.
  • Lee Becker, Rodney D. Nielsen, Ifeyinwa Okoye, Tamara Sumner, and Wayne H. Ward. (2010). What's next? Target Concept Identification and Sequencing. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Question Generation at the Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, (ITS 2010), pp 35-44, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, June 14-18, 2010.
  • Dmitriy Dligach, Rodney Nielsen, Martha Palmer. (2010). To Annotate More Accurately or to Annotate More. In Proceedings of the Fourth Linguistics Annotation Workshop, at the Forty-Eighth annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL-10), pp 64-72, Uppsala, Sweden, July 11-16, 2010. Published by the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL), Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
  • Jena D. Hwang, Rodney D. Nielsen and Martha Palmer. (2010). Towards a Domain Independent Semantics: Enhancing Semantic Representation with Construction Grammar. In Proceedings of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics P Human Language Technologies, Workshop on Extracting and Using Constructions in Computational Linguistics, (NAACL HLT 2010), pp 1-8, Los Angeles, California, June 1-6, 2010. Published by the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL), Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
  • Lee Becker, Rodney D. Nielsen, and Wayne Ward. (2009). What a pilot study says about running a question generation challenge. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Question Generation, at the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, Brighton, United Kingdom, July 6-10, 2009. IOS Press.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Lee Becker, and Wayne Ward. (2008). TAC 2008 CLEAR RTE system report: Facet-based entailment. In Proceedings of the Text Analysis Conference, Gaithersburg, Maryland, November 17-19, 2008. National Institute of Standards and Technology.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (2008). Question generation: Proposed challenge tasks and their evaluation. In Vasile Rus and Art Graesser (Eds.): Proceedings of the Workshop on the Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge, Arlington, Virginia, September 25-26, 2008.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (accepted). Identifying key concepts for question generation. Accepted to the Workshop on the Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge (combined with another accepted paper into the preceding paper), Arlington, Virginia, September 25-26, 2008.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Jason Buckingham, Gary Knoll, Ben Marsh and Leysia Palen. (2008). A Taxonomy of questions for question generation. In Vasile Rus and Art Graesser (Eds.): Proceedings of the Workshop on the Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge, Arlington, Virginia, September 25-26, 2008.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Wayne Ward and James H. Martin. (2008). Automatic generation of fine-grained representations of learner response semantics. In Beverly Park Woolf, Esma Aimeur, Roger Nkambou and Susanne P. Lajoie (Eds.): Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, (ITS 2008), pp 173-183, Montreal, Canada, June 23-27, 2008. Published by Springer, Heidelberg, Germany.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Wayne Ward, James H. Martin and Martha Palmer. (2008). Extracting a representation from text for semantic analysis. In Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the Human Language Technologies Conference, (ACL-08:HLT), pp 241-244, Columbus, Ohio, June 15-20, 2008. Published by the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL), Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Wayne Ward and James H. Martin. (2008). Classification errors in a domain-independent assessment system. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Innovative Use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications, at the Forty-Sixth annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL-08:HLT), pp 10-18, Columbus, Ohio, June 15-20, 2008. Published by the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL), Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Wayne Ward, James H. Martin and Martha Palmer. (2008). Annotating students' understanding of science concepts. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco, May 28-30, 2008. Published by the European Language Resources Association, (ELRA), Paris, France.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Wayne Ward and James H. Martin. (2008). Learning to assess low-level conceptual understanding. In David Wilson and H. Chad Lane (Eds.): Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Artificial Intelligence Researchers Society Conference, (FLAIRS-08), pp 427-432, Coconut Grove, Florida, May 15-17, 2008. Published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI Press), Menlo Park, California.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen and Wayne Ward. (2007). A corpus of fine-grained entailment relations. In Proceedings of the Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational Learning Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing, at the Forty-Fifth annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL-PASCAL-07), pp 28-35, Prague, Czech Republic, June 23-30, 2007. Published by the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL), Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
  • Steven Bethard, Rodney D. Nielsen, James H. Martin, Wayne Ward, and Martha Palmer. (2007). Semantic integration in learning from text. In Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium Series on Machine Reading, (AAAI SSS-07), Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, March 26-28, 2007. Published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI Press), Menlo Park, California.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Wayne Ward and James H. Martin. (2006). Toward dependency path based entailment. In Bernardo Magnini and Ido Dagan (Eds.): Proceedings of the Second PASCAL Recognising Textual Entailment Challenge Workshop, (PASCAL RTE 2006), pp 44-49, Venice, Italy, April 10, 2006. Published by the Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational Learning Network of Excellence, (PASCAL).
  • Rodney D. Nielsen and Sameer Pradhan. (2004). Mixing weak learners in semantic parsing. In Dekang Lin and Dekai Wu (Eds.): Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, (EMNLP 2004), pp 80-87, Barcelona, Spain, July 25-26, 2004. Published by the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL), Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (2004). MOB-ESP and other improvements in probability estimation. In Max Chickering and Joseph Halpern (Eds.): Proceedings of the Twentieth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, (UAI-2004), pp 418-425, Banff, Canada, July 7-11, 2004. Published by the Association for Computing Machinery, (ACM), New York, New York.

Ph.D. Thesis

Posters and Technical Reports

  • Natalie Parde and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2016). Getting to the heart of metaphors: Dependency-based detection of metaphoric juxtapositions. Poster at the 2016 CRA Women Graduate Cohort Workshop. San Diego, California, USA, April 15-16, 2016.
  • Natalie Parde, Michalis Papakostas, Konstantinos Tsiakas and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2015). "Is it rectangular?" Using I Spy as an interactive, game-based approach to multimodal robot learning. In the Student Abstract and Poster Program of the Twenty Ninth Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI-15). Austin, Texas, USA, January 25-29, 2015.
  • John Wes Solomon and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Predicting changes in systolic blood pressure in longitudinal patient records. At the AMIA 2014 Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) workshop on Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data. Washington, D.C., USA, November 14, 2014.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen, Mohammad Mahoor, Wilson Pace, Benjamin Miller, Wayne Ward, et al. (2014). Companionbots for Health Behavior Change Dialogue. Poster at the Annual NSF Smart and Connected Health Principal Investigators’ Meeting. Arlington, Virginia, USA, August 6-7, 2014.
  • Natalie Parde, Michalis Papakostas, Konstantinos Tsiakas, Maria Dagioglou, Vangelis Karkaletsis, and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014) I Spy: An interactive game-based approach to multimodal robot learning. At the 2014 International Research-Centered Summer School in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Robotics, Data and Content Analysis (IRSS14). NCRS Demokritos, Athens, Greece, July 3-30, 2014.
    First place (out of 13 international teams) and
    People's choice award
  • Karen Mazidi and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Automatically Generating Questions from Text. Poster at the 2014 CRA-Women Graduate Cohort Workshop. Santa Clara, California, April 11-12, 2014.
  • Natalie Parde and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Improving Cognition in the Elderly via Dialogue-Based Games with Teachable Robot Agents. Poster at the 2014 CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop. Santa Clara, California, USA, April 11-12, 2014.
  • Karen Mazidi and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Automatically generating questions from text. At UNT Toulouse Graduate School Graduate Exhibition. March 1, 2014.
    First place Computer Science and Information Technology
  • MingYu Lin, James Glenn, Frank Paiva and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2013). Comprehension SEEDING project: Comprehension through Self Explanation, Enhanced Discussion and INquiry Generation. At CENG Showcase of Undergraduate Research in Engineering 2013. September 20, 2013.
    First place Computer Science
  • Wilson Pace, Rodney D. Nielsen, Heather Anderson, Robert Valuck, Elias Brandt, and David R. West. (2010). Data Additions Related to Depression Care through Natural Language Processing. A report to Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness (DEcIDE) Program. November, 2010.
  • Les Sikos, Rodney D. Nielsen, Travis Rood, Laura A. Michaelis, Martha Palmer and Albert D. Kim. 2009. On the Road to Conventionalization: Analyses of Nominal Coercion. Poster presented at The Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Davis, CA. March 2009.
  • Markus Breitenbach, Rodney Nielsen and Gregory Grudic. (2003). Probabilistic random forests: Predicting data point specific Misclassification probabilities. Technical Report CU-CS-954-03, the University of Colorado at Boulder.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (1995). Automated unit test generation in expert systems. Andersen Consulting Technical Report, Chicago, Illinois.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (1995). End-user code generation in expert systems. Andersen Consulting Technical Report, Chicago, Illinois.

Other Invited Talks

  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (2016). Transdisciplinary Human Language Technology-Enabled Research: Advancing NLP in collaborative research on learning technologies, health informatics, clinical psychology and data science. Keynote at the COI 2016 Multi-Disciplinary Research Exchange conference (MDREC). Denton, Texas, USA, January 30, 2016.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (2014). Spoken-Dialog Healthcare Companionbots for Elders. At the 2014 International Research-Centered Summer School in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Robotics, Data and Content Analysis (IRSS14). NCRS Demokritos, Athens, Greece, July 9, 2014.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (2012). Companionbots: Perceptive, emotive, spoken-dialogue companion robots for health and wellbeing in the elderly. At University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 17, 2012.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (2012). Fine-Grained Learner Modeling. At the ARL-IIS Learner Modeling Techniques Advisory Board Meeting. Memphis, Tennessee, September 9-12, 2012.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (2011). The Multi-source Integrated Platform for Answering Clinical Questions (MiPACQ). At Advances in Clinical Question Answering: Watson meets Healthcare, John Hurdle and Guergana Savova moderators, at American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium (AMIA 2011). October 22-26, 2011. Washington D.C.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (2009). Combining statistical and knowledge-based approaches to improve information extraction. At Computational Bioscience Program, Denver Health Sciences Center / Anschutz Medical Campus, Denver, Colorado, April 27, 2009.
  • Rodney D. Nielsen. (2006). Learner answer assessment in intelligent tutoring systems. At the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2006.