COURSE INFORMATION
Instructor	Ani Nenkova, nenkova@seas.upenn.edu Office: Levine Hall 505 Office Hours: MW 3:15-4:15, or by appointment
Time	MW 4:30-6pm
Location	Towne 309
Description	How can we determine that a given text will be accessible to its intended audience? Or that a dialogue progresses smoothly, or a text is well structured and easy to understand? The seminar will give a comprehensive overview of current methods for modelling text readability and discourse structure. These topics have numerous applications in text producing NLP applications such as summarization, question answering and machine translation, as well as in computer aided education and dialgue systems and speech. Some of the readings will require general knowledge of probability and machine learning, but the course overall will be accessible to a large audience. Doctoral, master and advanced undergraduate students with interest in computational linguistics are encouraged to attened.
Required Work	20%: Paper presentation and class participation 30%: Litreture review 50%: Project

	SCHEDULE
Class	Date	Who	Topic and Readings
1	Sep 5	Ani	Course overview [ppt]
2	Sep 10	Ani	Centering theory and direct applications [ppt] Barbara Grosz, Aravind Joshi and Scott Weinstein, Centering: A Framework for Modelling the Local Coherence of Discourse. Computational Linguistics 21(2), pp. 203-225, 1995. Eleni Miltsakaki and Karen Kukich The Role of Centering Theory's Rough-Shift in the Teaching and Evaluation of Writing Skills Proceedings of the ACL, 2002. Nikiforos Karamanis (2007). Supplementing Entity Coherence with Local Rhetorical Relations for Information Ordering. To appear in Journal of Logic, Language and Information.
3	Sep 12	Ani	Rhetorical structure theory and automatic detection of rhetorical relations [pdf1,ppt2] William Mann and Sandra Thompson Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional thoery of text organization Text 8(3), 1988 Daniel Marcu and Abdessamad Echihabi An Unsupervised Approach to Recognizing Discourse Relations Proceeding of the ACL/NAACL, 2002 Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, Kathleen R. McKeown and Owen Rambow Building and Refining Rhetorical-Semantic Relation Models. In Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2007). Rochester, NY, 2007. Sporleder, C. and A. Lascarides [in press] Using Automatically Labelled Examples to Classify Rhetorical Relations: An Assessment, to appear in Natural Language Engineering.
4	Sep 17	Alan Lee	Penn discourse treebank Bonnie Webber Accounting for Discourse Relations: Constituency and Dependency In M. Butt, M. Dalrymple and T. King, Intelligent Linguistic Architectures, Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2006, pp. 339-360. Eleni Miltsakaki, Nikhil Dinesh, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber Experiments on Sense Annotations and Sense Disambiguation of Discourse Connectives, Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT2005), Barcelona, Spain. December 2005 Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki, and Bonnie Webber The Penn Discourse TreeBank as a Resource for Natural Language Generation Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Workshop on Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation, Birmingham, U.K. July 2005.
5	Sep 19	Ani	Text ordering and coherence Peter Foltz, Walter Kintsch and Thomas Landauer The Measurement of Textual Coherence with Latent Semantic Analysis. Discourse Processes, 25(2), pp. 285-307, 1998. Mirella Lapata. 2003 Probabilistic Text Structuring: Experiments with Sentence Ordering. In Proceedings of the 41st Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 545-552. Sapporo. Jane Morris and Graeme Hirst Lexical Cohesion Computed by Thesaural Relations as an Indicator of the Structure of Text. Computational Linguistics 17(1), pp. 21-48, 1991.
6	Sep 24	Emily P.	Local and global coherence Regina Barzilay, Lillian Lee Catching the Drift: Probabilistic Content Models, with Applications to Generation and Summarization. HLT-NAACL 2004: 113-120 Regina Barzilay, Mirella Lapata Modeling Local Coherence: An Entity-Based Approach. ACL 2005 Micha Elsner, Joseph Austerweil, and Eugene Charniak A Unified Local and Global Model for Discourse Coherence HLT-NAACL 2007.
7	Sep 26	Dan D.	The entropy rate principle Aylett, M. and Turk, A. (2004). The smooth signal redundancy hypothesis: A functional explanation for relationships between redundancy, prosodic prominence, and duration in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 47(1), 31-56. Genzel, D. and Charniak, E. (2002). Entropy rate constancy in text. In Proceedings of ACL-02. Genzel, D. and Charniak, E. (2003). Variation of Entropy and Parse Trees of Sentences as a Function of the Sentence Number. In Proceedings of EMNLP-03. Keller, F. (2004). The entropy rate principle as a predictor of processing effort: An evaluation against eye-tracking data. In In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Barcelona, pp. 317-324.
8	Oct 1	Catherine	Alignment in dialogue Pickering, M. J. & Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 169-226. Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., & Cleland, A. A. (2000). Syntactic coordination in dialogue. Cognition, 75(2), B13-B25. (A)
9	Oct 3	Sophie	Mimicry Bailenson, J.N., Yee, N., Patel, K., & Beall, A.C. (2007, in press). Detecting Digital Chameleons. Computers in Human Behavior. Jared Curhan, Alex Pentland, Ron Caneel, Nathan Eagle, Martin Martin. 2005. Thin Slices of Negotation. Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management.)
10	Oct 8	Alexis	Turn-taking and grounding Edlund, J., & Beskow, J. Pushy versus meek using avatars to influence turn-taking behaviour. Interspeech 2007. Skantze, G. Making grounding decisions: Data-driven estimation of dialogue costs and confidence thresholds. SigDial 2007.
11	Oct 10	Ani	Entrainment I Andrew R. McGarva and Rebecca M. Warner Attraction and Social Coordination: Mutual Entrainment of Vocal Activity Rhythms Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Volume 32, Number 3 / May, 2003. T. Chartrand and J Bargh The chameleon effect: the perception-behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, June 1999 Vol. 76, No. 6, 893-910. Rachel Coulston, Sharon Oviatt, Courtney Darves Amplitude Convergence in Children's Conversational Speech with Animated Personas Proceedings of ICSLP'02.
12	Oct 15		No class; fall break
13	Oct 17	Ali	Entrainment II David Reitter, Frank Keller, and Johanna D. Moore Computational modeling of structural priming in dialogue. HLT-NAACL 2006. David Reitter and Johanna D. Moore Predicting success in dialogue. In Proc. Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Prague, Czech Republic, 2007. Susan Brennan Lexical entrainment in spontaneous dialog" Proceedings of the International Symposium on Spoken Dialog, 1996. J. Gustafson, A. Larsson, R. Carlson, K. Hellman How Do System Questions Influence Lexical Choices In User Answers? Proc. Eurospeech '97. Linda Bell, Johan Boye, Joakim Gustafson, Mats Wirn Modality Convergence in a Multimodal Dialogue System roceedings of Gtalog 2000, Fourth Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue.
14	Oct 22	Annie L.	Lay readers of technical text Noemie Elhadad Comprehending Technical Texts: Predicting and Defining Unfamiliar Terms AMIA Annual Symposium, pp. 239-243, 2006. Noemie Elhadad and Komal Sutaria Mining a Lexicon of Technical Terms and Lay Equivalents ACL BioNLP Workshop, 2007.
15	Oct 24	Sophie?	Readability K. Collins-Thompson and J. Callan. A language modeling approach to predicting reading difficulty.HLT/NAACL 2004. Sarah E. Schwarm and Mari Ostendorf Reading Level Assessment Using Support Vector Machines and Statistical Language Models. ACL 2005. M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, J. Callan, and M. Eskenazi. Combining lexical and grammatical features to improve readability measures for first and second language texts. NAACL-HLT 2007. E. Miltsakaki and A. Troutt. READ-X: Automatic evaluation of reading difficulty of web text In Proceedings of E-Learn.
16	Oct 29	Jieun	Syntactic simplification and cohesion Advaith Siddharthan. "Syntactic Simplification and Text Cohesion". In Research on Language and Computation, Volume 4, Issue 1, Jun 2006, Pages 77--109.
17	Oct 31	Annie L.	Referring expressions as a cohesive device Ehud Reiter and Robert Dale A Fast Algorithm for the Generation of Referring Expressions COLING 2002. Advaith Siddharthan and Ann Copestake Generating Referring Expressions in Open Domains. ACL 2004.
18	Nov 5	Emily	Referring expressions II Krahmer, E. and M. Theune (2002) Efficient context-sensitive generation of referring expressions, in: Information Sharing: Givenness and Newness in Language Processing, K. van Deemter and R.Kibble (eds.), CSLI Publications, Stanford, 223-264. Ani Nenkova and Kathleen McKeown References to Named Entities: a Corpus Study Proceedings of the NAACL/HLT, 2003 (Companion Volume).
19	Nov 7	Noorain	Time and discourse Bonnie Webber Tense as discourse anaphor Computational Linguistics, 14(2), 1988. Inderjeet Mani and George Wilson Robust Temporal Processing of the News ACL 2000. Inderjeet Mani, Barry Schiffman and Jianping Zhang Inferring Temporal ordering of the Events in News HLT-NAACL 2003.
20	Nov 12	Dan D.?	Temporal relations II Mirella Lapata and Alex Lascarides. 2006. Learning Sentence-internal Temporal Relations Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 27, 85-117. Inderjeet Mani, Marc Verhagen, Ben Wellner, Chong Min Lee, James Pustejovsky Machine Learning of Temporal Relations. ACL 2006 Nathanael Chambers, Shan Wang and Dan Jurafsky Classifying Temporal Relations Between Events. Short paper, ACL 2007.
21	Nov 14	Alexis	Dialog acts Stolcke, Andreas, Klaus Ries, Noah Coccaro, Elizabeth Shriberg, Rebecca Bates, Daniel Jurafsky, Paul Taylor, Rachel Martin, Marie Meteer, and Carol Van Ess-Dykema. 2000. Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech. Computational Linguistics 26:3, 339-371.
22	Nov 19	Presenter	Detecting communication failure Julia Hirschberg, Diane Litman and Marc Swerts Prosodic and Other Cues to Speech Recognition Failures Speech Communication 2004. Marilyn Walker, Irene Langkilde-Geary, Helen Wright Hastie, Jerry Wright, and Allen Gorin Automatically Training A Problematic Dialogue Predictor for the HMIHY Spoken Dialogue System Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2002.
23	Nov 21	Jieun	Recognition problems, intelligibility Mihai Rotaru and Diane Litman Discourse Structure and Speech Recognition Problems Interspeech/ICSLP 2006. Langner, B. and Black, A. Using Speech in Noise to Improve Understandability for Elderly Listeners ASRU 2005.
24	Nov 26	Presenter	Models of reading Norris, D. (in press) The Bayesian Reader: Explaining word recognition as an optimal Bayesian decision process. Psychological Review . Reichle, E. D., Rayner, K., & Pollatsek, A. (2003) The E-Z Reader model of eye movement control in reading: Comparisons to other models. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 26, 445-476.
25	Nov 28	Ali	Perception of liveliness and charisma Hincks, R. Measuring liveliness in presentation speech. Interspeech 2005 (pp. 765-768). Andrew Rosenberg and Julia Hirschberg. Acoustic/Prosodic and Lexical Correlates of Charismatic Speech. EUROSPEECH'05.
26	Dec 3	Presenter	Project presentations
27	Dec 5	Presenter	Project presentations