Nikhil Dinesh's Home Page

Nikhil Dinesh

Department of Computer and Information Science
Unversity of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
email:My first name followed by d at seas dot upenn dot edu

Research: I am interested in applications of logic and natural language processing (with a tentative hope that there will be an intersection some day). 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:

Permission to Speak: A Logic for Access Control and Conformance - Nikhil Dinesh, Aravind Joshi, Insup Lee and Oleg Sokolsky. In Submission. A preliminary version appeared as an invited paper in the Workshop on Formal Languages for Contrat-Oriented Software (FLACOS '08)

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)

Contact Information:

513 Levine Hall, Department of Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, PA 19104.

Home Phone: (215) 740 0258

Nikhil Dinesh

My ego count says that you are visitor no.