RASHMI PRASAD

Senior Research Scientist

Institute for Research in Cognitive Science

University of Pennsylvania

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Penn Discourse Treebank.
  
• Discourse parsing.
  
• Anaphora resolution and generation.
  
• Sentence planning in generation.
  
• Automatic dialogue act tagging.
  
• XTAG project.
  
  

TEACHING

• Linguistics Pragmatics I (Ling590):
  Spring 2005 (Linguistics Dept., UPenn.)
  
• Discourse Annotation: Discourse Connectives and Discourse Relations:
  Tutorial at COLING/ACL 2006 (with Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber)
  

PhD DISSERTATION: 2003

• Constraints on the Generation of Referring Expressions, with Special Reference to Hindi
  Linguistics Department, University of Pennsylvania
  Advisor: Ellen Prince.
  Committee: Aravind Joshi, Robin Clark
  
  

PUBLICATIONS

• 2008
  A Discourse-based Approach to Generating Why-Questions from Texts
  
  Rashmi Prasad and Aravind Joshi
  To appear in Proceedings of the Workshop on the Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge
  Arlington, VA, September 2008
  Departures from Tree Structures in Discourse: Shared Arguments in the Penn Discourse Treebank
  
  Alan Lee, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the Constraints in Discourse III Workshop
  Potsdam, Germany, July-August 2008
  Sentence-Initial Discourse Connectives, Discourse Structure and Semantics
  
  Bonnie Webber and Rashmi Prasad
  Proceedings of the Workshop on Formal and Experimental Approaches to Discourse Particles and Modal Adverbs
  Hamburg, Germany, August 2008
  A Pilot Annotation to Investigate Discourse Connectivity in Biomedical Text
  
  Hong Yu, Nadya Frid, Susan McRoy, Rashmi Prasad, Alan Lee and Aravind Joshi
  Proceedings of the ACL:HLT 2008 BioNLP Workshop
  Columbus, Ohio, June 2008
  Exploring Discourse Connectivity in Biomedical Text for Text Mining
  
  Hong Yu, Nadya Frid, Susan McCroy, P Simpson, Rashmi Prasad, Alan Lee and Aravind Joshi
  Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology BioLINK SIG Meeting
  Toronto, Canada, 2008
  The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0. Annotation Manual
  
  The PDTB-Group
  IRCS Technical Report IRCS-08-01
  Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania
  The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0.
  
  Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki, Livio Robaldo, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008) (to appear)
  Marrakech, Morocco, May 2008
  Towards an Annotated Corpus of Discourse Relations in Hindi
  
  Rashmi Prasad, Samar Husain, Dipti Mishra Sharma and Aravind Joshi
  Proceedings of the IJCNLP-08 Workshop on Asian Language Resources
  Hyderabad, India. January 2008
  Discourse Structure: Swings and Roundabouts
  
  Bonnie Webber and Rashmi Prasad
  Linguistics, Special issue on Structuring Information in Discourse: the Explicit/Implicit Dimension
  Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen and Bergljot Behrens (eds) (to appear)

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• 2007
  Individual and Domain Adaptation in Sentence Planning for Dialogue
  
  Marilyn Walker, Amanda Stent, Francois Mairesse and Rashmi Prasad
  Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
  Vol. 30, pp. 413-456, 2007
  Attribution and its Annotation in the Penn Discourse TreeBank
  
  Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Traitement Automatique des Langues, Special Issue on Computational Approaches to Document and Discourse
  Vol.47, n.2. 2007
  An Unsupervised Method for Learning Generation Dictionaries for Spoken Dialogue Systems by Mining User Reviews
  
  Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Marilyn Walker and Rashmi Prasad
  ACM Transactions in Speech and Language Processing (TSLP)
  Vol. 4, Issue 4, Article 8, 2007

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• 2006
  Complexity of Dependencies in Discourse: Are Dependencies in Discourse More Complex Than in Syntax?
  
  Alan Lee, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, Nikhil Dinesh and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories
  Prague, Czech Republic. December 2006.
  Annotating Attribution in the Penn Discourse TreeBank
  
  Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Proceedings of the COLING/ACL Workshop on Sentiment and Subjectivity in Text
  Sydney, Australia. July 2006.
  Learning to Generate Naturalistic Utterances Using Reviews in Spoken Dialogue Systems
  
  Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Rashmi Prasad, and Marilyn Walker
  Proceedings of COLING/ACL
  Sydney, Australia. July 2006.
  The Penn Discourse TreeBank 1.0. Annotation Manual
  
  The PDTB-Group
  IRCS Technical Report IRCS-06-01
  Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania.

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• 2005
  Experiments on Sense Annotations 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 Linguistic Theories (TLT2005)
  Barcelona, Spain. December 2005
  Augmenting Variation of System Utterances Using Corpora in Spoken Dialog Systems
  
  Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Rashmi Prasad, and Marilyn Walker
  Proceedings of IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) Workshop
  San Juan, Mexico. November 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, U.K. July 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.
  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: Pie in the Sky
  Ann Arbor, Michigan. June 2005.
  Combining Centering Constraints and Gricean Maxims for the Generation of Referring Expressions
  
  Rashmi Prasad
  Workshop on the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface: A Tribute to Ellen Prince
  Philadelphia, PA. April 2005.
  Anaphora Resolution: A Centering Approach
  
  Aravind Joshi, Rashmi Prasad, and Eleni Miltsakaki
  Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Volume II.

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• 2004
  Annotation and Data Mining of the Penn Discourse TreeBank
  
  Rashmi Prasad, Eleni Miltsakaki, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  ACL Workshop on Discourse Annotation
  Barcelona, Greece. July 2004.
  Trainable Sentence Planning for Complex Information Presentation in Spoken Dialog Systems
  
  Amanda Stent, Rashmi Prasad and Marilyn Walker
  Association of Computational Linguistics
  Barcelona, Greece. July 2004.
  The Predicate-Argument Structure of Discourse Connectives: A Corpus-based Study
  
  Cassandre Creswell, Katherine Forbes, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber
  Anaphora Prodessing: Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Modeling. 2004.
  Antonio Branco, Tony McEnery, and Ruslan Mitkov, (eds.), John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  The Penn Discourse TreeBank
  
  Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber
  Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
  Lisbon, Portugal. 2004.
  Annotating Discourse Connectives and their Arguments
  
  Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber
  Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation
  Boston, MA. 2004.

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• 2003
  DLTAG System - Discourse Parsing with a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar
  
  Katherine Forbes, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Anoop Sarkar, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  Journal of Logic, Language and Information, "Special Issue on Discourse and Information Structure"
  Vol 12(3). Kluwer,, 2003.
  A Trainable Generator for Recommendations in Multimodal Dialogue
  
  Marilyn Walker, Rashmi Prasad, Amanda Stent
  Eurospeech, Geneva, Switzerland. 2003.

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• 2002
  The Discourse Anaphoric Properties of Connectives
  
  Cassandre Cresswell, Katherine Forbes, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  4th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC), 2002.
  DARPA Communicator Evaluation: Progress from 2000 to 2001
  
  Marilyn Walker, Alex Rudnicky, John Aberdeen , Elizabeth Bratt, John Garofolo, Helen Hastie, Audrey Le, Bryan Pellom, Alex Potamianos, Rebecca Passonneau, Rashmi Prasad, Salim Roukos, Greg Sanders, Stephanie Seneff and Dave Stallard
  7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2002.
  DARPA Communicator: Cross-System Results for the 2001 Evaluation
  
  Marilyn Walker, Alex Rudnicky, Rashmi Prasad, John Aberdeen, Elizabeth Bratt, John Garofolo, Helen Hastie, Audrey Le, Bryan Pellom, Alex Potamianos, Rebecca Passonneau, Salim Roukos, Greg Sanders, Stephanie Seneff and Dave Stallard
  7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2002.
  Training a Dialogue Act Tagger for Human-Human and Human-Computer Travel Dialogues
  
  Rashmi Prasad and Marilyn Walker
  3rd SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialog, 2002.
  What's the Trouble: Automatically Identifying Problematic Dialogs in DARPA Communicator Dialog Systems
  
  Helen Wright Hastie, Rashmi Prasad and Marilyn Walker
  Association of Computational Linguistics, 2002.
  Automatic Evaluation: Using a DATE Dialogue Act Tagger for User Satisfaction and Task Completion Prediction
  
  Helen Wright Hastie, Rashmi Prasad and Marilyn Walker
  Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2002.

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• 2001
  DLTAG System - Discourse Parsing with a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar
  
  Katherine Forbes, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Anoop Sarkar, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber
  ESSLLI 2001 Workshop on "Information Structure, Discourse Structure and Discourse Semantics, 2001.
  A Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for English.
  
  The XTAG Research group.
  IRCS Technical Report 01-03. University of Pennsylvania.
  Centering in Relative Clauses
  
  Rashmi Prasad
  International Workshop on Reference and Coherence in Discourse: Formal, functional and cognitive approaches, 2001.

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• 2000
  Comparing Test-Suite Based Evaluation and Corpus-Based Evaluation of a Wide-Coverage Grammar for English
  
  Rashmi Prasad and Anoop Sarkar
  Using Evaluation within HLT Programs: Results and Trends. LREC'2000 Satellite Workshop, pp.7-12, 2000.
  A Corpus Study of Zero Pronouns in Hindi: An Account Based on Centering Transition Preferences
  
  Rashmi Prasad
  Discourse Anaphora and Reference Resolution Conference (DAARC), pp. 66-71, 2000.
  Discourse Salience and Pronoun Resolution in Hindi
  
  Rashmi Prasad and Michael Strube
  Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol 6.3, pp. 189-208, 2000.
  A Quantitative Analysis of the Loss of V2 in the History of English
  
  Rashmi Prasad
  19th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL19), pp. 371-384, 2000.

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• 1999
  A Centering Account of Zero Pronouns in Hindi
  
  Rashmi Prasad
  9th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse, 1999.

rjprasad then AT then seas.upenn.edu

Last modified: Thu Aug 21 11:34:14 EDT 2008