Natural language research announcements

["Samdani, Rajhans" <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Hi all,

We kick-off the AIIS seminar this semester with a talk by Prof. Ani Nenkova 
(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~nenkova/) from the University of Pennsylvania. 

* Please notice that we'll resume our 2 pm Friday slot for the seminar this 
semester *

** MEETING: Please send me or 
bisk1 AT illinois.edu
 an email if you wat to meet Prof. Nenkova **

Following are the details of the talk

When: Jan 25, 2 pm.

Where: 3405, Siebel Center

Title:
Assessing text quality with automatic text specificity and communicative goal 
predictions 

Abstract:
Aspiring writers are often told that in order to learn to write well, they 
need to read high quality texts. Most of us, however, find it surprisingly 
hard to pinpoint what aspects of well-written texts make them so good. In 
this talk I will present our most recent work on automatic discovery of 
elements of text quality with a focus on discovery of communicative goals and 
text specificity. Our results suggest that the quality of texts form several 
genres could be predicted automatically. 

Our models of communicative goals rely entirely on structural features to 
detect sentences with similar communicative goals across a collection of 
texts. Our experiments show that coherent texts exhibit strong structural 
patterns in pairs of adjacent sentences and that text coherence can be 
accurately estimated from these patterns. We have applied this coherence 
model to academic and journalistic writing. We have found significant 
differences in the communicative goals expressed in great and typical writing 
in these domains and I will discuss some of these differences. 

This is joint work with Annie Louis. 

Bio:
Ani Nenkova is an Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science at 
the University of Pennsylvania. Her main areas of research are automatic 
summarization, discourse, and text quality. She obtained her PhD degree in 
Computer Science from Columbia University in 2006. She also spent a year and 
a half as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University before joining Penn in 
Fall 2007. 

Best,
Rajhans