Emily Pitler

2nd year PhD student in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania

Office: Levine 514 and IRCS 405

Email: epitler at seas dot upenn dot edu


Research

My research interests include computational linguistics and machine learning. Specifically, I am interested in predicting text quality using linguistic factors including syntax and discourse relations, and automatically identifying discourse relations. I am interested in both evaluating human-written texts for readability and using readability measures to improve machine-generated text. My advisor is Ani Nenkova.

Previous Education

2007: BS in Computer Science, Yale University

Publications

Emily Pitler, Annie Louis, and Ani Nenkova. Automatic Sense Prediction for Implicit Discourse Relations in Text. (To Appear) Proceedings of ACL, 2009.

Emily Pitler and Ani Nenkova. Using Syntax to Disambiguate Explicit Discourse Connectives in Text. (To Appear) Proceedings of ACL, short paper, 2009.

Emily Pitler and Ken Church. Using Word-Sense Disambiguation Methods to Classify Web Queries by Intent. (To Appear) Proceedings of EMNLP, 2009.

Emily Pitler and Ani Nenkova. Revisiting Readability: A Unified Framework for Predicting Text Quality. Proceedings of EMNLP, 2008.

Emily Pitler, Mridhula Raghupathy, Hena Mehta, Ani Nenkova, Alan Lee, Aravind Joshi. Easily Identifiable Discourse Relations. Proceedings of COLING, 2008. Poster paper.
The extended version is Easily Identifiable Discourse Relations. University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MS-CIS-08-24.

Dongyu Lin, Emily Pitler, Dean P. Foster, Lyle H. Ungar. In Defense of L0. Sparse Optimization and Variable Selection, Workshop, ICML/COLT/UAI, July, 2008.

Samarth Keshava and Emily Pitler. A Simpler, Intuitive Approach to Morpheme Induction. 2nd Pascal Challenges Workshop, Venice, Italy, 2006. The code is available here: reports.pl.

Teaching

Teaching Assistant for CIS 112 with Michael Kearns Spring 2009.
Teaching Assistant for CIS 502 with Sudipto Guha Fall 2008.

Work Experience

Summer 2008: Research Intern, Text Mining, Search, and Navigation, Microsoft Research
Summer 2006: Software Design Engineer, Microsoft
October 2005-May 2007: Quantitative Reasoning Tutor, Yale University
Summer 2005: Systems Programmer, America Online