Research: My interests lie in the semantics of natural language from
the perspectives of theory, annotation and application. My
advisors are Professors
Aravind Joshi and
Insup Lee.
I am currently involved in two projects:
-
Extracting Formal Specifications from Natural Language Policy - The goal
of this project is to enable the extraction of specifications from policy
through a
systematic machine-assisted process to test an implementation's conformance
with the policy, and the consistency of the policy itself.
-
The Penn Discourse TreeBank -
The PDTB builds on the view that discourse connectives are low-level
discourse predicates that project predicate-argument structure on par
with verbs at the sentence level
(Webber '04). It is an undertaking to annotate the million-word WSJ corpus with
connectives (subordinating conjunctions like because, coordinating
conjunctions like but, and adverbials like instead), their
arguments, attribution of the arguments and the relation established by
a connective, and the sense of each relation.
Papers:
Reasoning about Conditions and Exceptions to Laws in Regulatory Conformance Checking - Nikhil Dinesh, Aravind Joshi,
Insup Lee and Oleg Sokolsky. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science (DEON) (2008).
Expanded version which is a technical report MS-CIS-08-07.
Checking Traces for Regulatory Conformance - Nikhil Dinesh, Aravind Joshi,
Insup Lee and Oleg Sokolsky. Proceedings of the Workshop on Runtime Verification (RV) (2008)
Logic-based Regulatory Conformance Checking - Nikhil Dinesh, Aravind Joshi,
Insup Lee and Oleg Sokolsky. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Monterey Workshop (2007)
Modeling and Implementing Knowledge-Based Protocols - Survey paper
written for the WPE-II exam, and slides from the talk.
Extracting Formal Specifications
from Natural Language Regulatory Documents - Nikhil Dinesh, Aravind Joshi,
Insup Lee and Bonnie Webber. Proceedings of the Fifth
International Workshop on Inference in Computational Semantics (ICoS-5),
Buxton, England (2006)
Experiments on Sense Annotation and Sense
Disambiguation of Discourse Connectives - Eleni Miltsakaki, Nikhil Dinesh,
Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber. Proceedings of the Fourth
Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistics Theories (TLT), Barcelona, Spain
(2005)
The Penn Discourse Treebank as a
Resource for Natural Language Generation - Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi,
Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki and Bonnie Webber. Proceedings of
the Corpus Linguistics Workshop on Using Corpora for Natural Language
Generation, Birmingham, UK (2005)
A Short Introduction to the Penn Discourse
TreeBank - Bonnie Webber, Aravind Joshi, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad,
Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee and Kate Forbes. Copenhagen Working Papers in
Language and Speech Processing (2005)
Attribution and the (Non)-Alignment
of Syntactic and Discourse Arguments of Connectives - Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind
Joshi and Bonnie Webber. Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on
Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II, Ann Arbor, Michigan (2005)
Extracting Traceable Formal Models From Natural
Language Policy - Nikhil Dinesh, Arvind Easwaran, David Arney, Alan Abrahams, Owen Rambow, Aravind Joshi and Insup Lee. Poster presented at the annual
research review and workshop on
High-Confidence Embedded Systems, Lincoln, Nebraska (2005)
Some of the other grad students doing NLP at Penn:
John Blitzer
Yuan Ding
Liang Huang
Ryan McDonald
Links:
The XTAG Project
A Java API for Annotation Graphs
Java API
The Apache XML Project
The World Wide Web Consortium
Ocaml Manual
Contact Information:
3510 Hamilton Street,
3E,
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, PA 19104.
Home Phone: (215) 740 0258
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