Eugene Charniak

Curriculum Vitae
1. Personal

Professor
Department of Computer Science
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912

2. Home Address
106 Halsey Street
Providence, RI 02906

3. Education

A.B. with Honors, Physics, University of Chicago, 1967

M.S., Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, 1968

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, 1972

Dissertation topic: Toward a Model of Children's Story Comprehension

(supervised by M. Minsky)

4. Professional Appointments

1968-1971 Teaching Assistant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

1971-1972 Research Assistant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

1972-1973 Research Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

1973-1975 Research Scientist, Institute of Semantic and Cognitive Studies, Lugano, Switzerland

1976-1977 Institute of Semantic and Cognitive Studies became part of the Computer Science
Department, University of Geneva

1977-1978 Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New
Haven, CT

1978-1979 Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Brown University,

Providence, RI

1979-1981 Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive and Linguistic Science, Brown
University, Providence, RI

1981-1984 Associate Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive and Linguistic Science, Brown
University, Providence, RI
1984- Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive and Linguistic Science, Brown University,
Providence, RI

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1984-1985 Visiting Professor of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven CT

1991-1997 Chairman, Department of Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, RI

1998 Visiting Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, MD

5. Publications
Books

Computational Semantics: An Introduction to Artificial

Intelligence and Natural Language Comprehension (with Y. Wilks),
North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam (1976).

Artificial Intelligence Programming (with C. Riesbeck and D. V.

McDermott), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ (1980). Second Edition
(with C. Riesbeck, D. V. McDermott and J. R. Meehan) (1987).

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence(with D. V. McDermott), Addison-Wesley, Reading,

MA (1985).

Statistical Language Learning MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1993).

Chapters in Books

Context and the Reference Problem,'' Natural Language Processing (ed. R. Rustin),
pp. 311-331, Algorithmics Press, New York (1972).

Introduction to Syntax,'' Computational Semantics: An Introduction to Artificial

Intelligence and Natural Language Comprehension
(ed. E. Charniak and Y. Wilks), North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam (1976).

Reference and Question Answering in Simple Narration,'' Semantics and Artificial

Intelligence
(ed. P. Eisenberg), W. de Gruyter, Berlin (1976) (in German).

Inference and Knowledge,'' Computational Semantics: An Introduction to Artificial

Intelligence and Natural Language Comprehension (ed. E. Charniak and Y. Wilks),
North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam (1976).

``Knowledge and Inference in Language Comprehension: An Overview,''

Machine Representations of Knowledge, D. Reidel Publishing Co., Netherlands (1977).

``Context Recognition in Language Comprehension,'' Strategies for Natural Language

Processing (ed. W. Lehnert and M. Ringle), Laurence Erlbaum Associates,
Hillsdale, NJ (1982).

``Cognitive Science is Methodologically Fine,'' Methods and Tactics in Cognitive

Science (ed. W. Kintch, J.R. Miller and P.G. Polson), Laurence Erlbaum Associates,
Hillsdale, NJ (1983).

``A Parser with Something for Everyone,'' Parsing Natural Language

(ed. M. King), Academic Press, London (1983).

``Parsing, How To,'' Automatic Natural Language Parsing (ed. K. Sparck

Jones and Y. Wilks), Wiley, Colchester, England (1983).

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 ``Probabilistic Text Understanding'' (with Robert Goldman), Statistics and Computing
.Also in Artificial Intelligence Frontiers in Statistics:
AI and Statistics III (ed. D. J. Hand), Chapman and Hall (1992).

``A Statistical Syntactic Disambiguation Program and What it Learns'' (with Murat
Ersan), Symbolic, Connectionist, and Statistical Approaches to Learning for
Natural Language Processing (ed. S. Wermter, E. Riloff, and G. Scheler),
Springer, pp. 146-160 (1996).

Refereed Journal Articles

``A Framed PAINTING: The Representation of a Common Sense Knowledge

Fragment,'' Cognitive Science 1 (4), pp. 355-395 (1977). Also published as Technical
Report 31, Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies, Geneva, Switzerland (1977).

``On the Use of Framed Knowledge in Language Comprehension,'' Artificial Intelligence

11 (3), pp. 225-265 (1978). Also published as Research Report 137,
Yale University Artificial Intelligence Project (1978).

``A Common Representation for Problem Solving and Language Comprehension

Information,'' Artificial Intelligence, 16, pp. 225-255 (1981).

``The Case-Slot Identity Theory,'' Cognitive Science 5 (3), pp. 285-292 (1981).

``Passing Markers: A Theory of Contextual Influence in Language

Comprehension,'' Cognitive Science, pp. 171-190 (1983).

``Motivation Analysis, Abductive Unification, and Non-Monotonic Equality,''

Artificial Intelligence, 34 (3), pp. 275-296 (1988).

``Dynamic Construction of Belief Networks'' (with Robert Goldman), Proc. Conference

on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, (1990). Also appears in Uncertainty in Artificial
Intelligence, 6, pp. 171-184 (1991).

``Bayesian Networks Without Tears,'' AI Magazine, pp. 50-63 (1991).

``A Language for Construction of Belief Networks'' (with Robert Goldman),

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,15 (3), pp. 196-208
(1993).

``A Bayesian Model of Plan Recognition'' (with Robert Goldman), Artifical

Intelligence Journal, 64 (1), pp. 53-79 (1993).

`Cost-Based Abduction and MAP Explanation'' (with Solomon Shimony),

Artificial Intelligence Journal, 66, pp. 345-374 (1994).

``Taggers for Parsers'' (with G. Carroll, J. Adcock, A. Cassandra, Y. Gotoh, J. Katz, M.

Littman, and J. McCann), Artificial Intelligence Journal, 85 (1-2), pp. 45-57 (1996).

``Statistical Techniques for Natural Language Parsing,'' AI Magazine, 18 (4), pp. 33-43
(1997).

``New Figures of Merit for Best-first Probabilistic Chart Parsing'' (with Sharon
Caraballo), Computational Linguistics, 24, pp. 275-298 (1998).

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Refereed Conference Articles

``Computer Comprehension of Calculus Word Problems,'' Proc. 1969

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 303-316 (1969).

``Jack and Janet in Search of a Theory of Knowledge,''Proc. 1973

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1973).

``A Partial Taxonomy of Knowledge About Actions,'' Technical Report,

Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies, Castagnola, Switzerland (1975).
Also published in Proc. 1975 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

``Organization and Inference in a Frame-Like System of Common Sense Knowledge,''

Papers for the Workshop on Theoretical Issuesin Natural Language Processing, M.I.T.
(1975).

``Ms. Malaprop, A Language Comprehension Program,'' Proc. 1977 International Joint

Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1977). Also published as Research Technical
Report 31, Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies, Geneva, Switzerland (1977).

``With a Spoon in My Hand This Must be the Eating Frame,'' Proc. Second Workshop on
Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing (1978). Also published in
Journal of Computational Linguistics (1978).

`Six Topics in Search of a Parser: An Overview of AI Language Research'' (with W.

Lehnert and M. Ringle), Proc. Seventh Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1981).

``Word Sense and Case Slot Disambiguation'' (with Graeme Hirst), Proc. 1982 National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1982).

``The Bayesian Basis of Common Sense Medical Diagnosis,'' Proc. 1983 National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1983).

``Time and Tense in English'' (with Mary Harper), Proc. 1986 Conference of the
Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 3-9 (1986).

``A Neat Theory of Marker Passing,'' Proc. 1986 National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, pp. 584-589 (1986).

`A Connectionist Context-Free Parser Which is Not Context-Free, But Then

It is Not Really Connectionist Either'' (with Eugene Santos), Proc. Ninth Annual
Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (1987).

`A Logic for Semantic Interpretation'' (with Robert Goldman), Proc. 1988 Conference of
the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 87-94 (1988).

`A Probabilistic ATMS for Plan Recognition'' (with Robert Goldman), Workshop on Plan
Recognition, AAAI Press (1988).

``A Semantics for Probabilistic Quantifier-Free First-Order Languages with Particular

Application to Story Understanding'' (with Robert Goldman), Proc. 1989 International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1074-1079 (1989).

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``Plan Recognition in Stories and in Life'' (with Robert Goldman), Proc. Fifth Workshop
on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 54-59 (1989).

``A Probabilistic Approach to Plan-Recognition and Text Understanding - Work

in Progress'' (with Robert Goldman), Proc. Second Workshop on Plan Recognition,
IJCAI 1989 pp. 1-5 (1989).

``Probabilistic Semantics for Cost-Based Abduction'' (with Solomon E. Shimony),

Proc. 1990 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1990).

``A New Algorithm for Finding MAP Assignments to Belief Networks'' (with
Solomon E. Shimony), Proc. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence,
(1990).

``A Probabilistic Approach to Text Understanding'' (with Robert Goldman),

Third International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (1991).

``A Probabilistic Model of Plan Recognition'' (with Robert Goldman), Proc. 1991
Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (1991).

``A Probabilistic Analysis of Marker-Passing Techniques for Plan-Recognition'' (with

Glenn Carroll), Proc. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (1991).

``A New Admissible Heuristic for Minimal-Cost Proofs'' (with Saadia Husain),
Proc. 1991 Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (1992).

``Two Experiments on Learning Probabilistic Dependency Grammars from Corpora''

(with Glenn Carroll), AAAI-92 Workshop on Statistically-Based NLP Techniques
, AAAI Press (1992).

``Dynamic MAP Calculations for Abduction'' (with Eugene Santos),

Proc. Tenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press/MIT Press
(1992).

`Learning Probabilistic Dependency Grammars from Labelled Text'' (with Glenn

Carroll), Working Notes, AAAI Fall Symposium Series (1992).

`Equations for Part-of-Speech Tagging'' (with C. Hendrickson, N. Jacobson, and

M. Perkowitz), Proc. Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1993).
Received AAAI best-written-paper award.

``Context-Sensitive Statistics for Improved Grammatical Language Models''

(with Glenn Carroll), Proc. Twelfth National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, AAAI Press/MIT Press (1994).

``Figures of Merit for Best-First Probabilistic Chart Parsing'' (with Sharon

Caraballo), Proc. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language
Processing, pp. 127-132 (1996).

``Tree-bank Grammars,'' Proc. Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial

Intelligence, AAAI Press/MIT Press, pp. 1031-1036 (1996).

``Statistical Parsing with a Context-free Grammar and Word Statistics'' Proc. of the
Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI Press/MIT Press (1997),
Best Paper Award.

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``Edge-based Best-first Chart Parsing'' (with Sharon Goldwater and Mark Johnson),
Proc. Sixth Workshop on Very Large Corpora, pp. 127-133
(1998).

``Noun-phrase Co-occurrence Statistics for Semi-automatic Semantic Lexicon

Construction'' (with Brian Roark), 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational
Linguistics , pp.1110-1116 (1998).

``A Statistical Approach to Anaphora Resolution'' (with Niyu Ge and John Hale),
Proc. Sixth Workshop on Very Large Corpora, pp.161-171 (1998).

"Finding Parts in Very Large Corpora" (with Matthew Berland), Proceedings

of the ACL-1999, pp. 57-64 (1999).

"Automatic Compensation for Parser Figure-of-merit Flaws" (with Don Blaheta),

Proceedings of the ACL-1999, pp. 513-518 (1999).

"Determining the Specificity of Nouns from Text" (with Sharon Caraballo),

1999 Joint Sigdat Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language
Processing and Very Large Corpora pp. 63-70 (1999).

``Reading comprehension programs in a statistical-language-processing class'' (with

several co-authors) Proceedings of the NAACL2000 Workshop on Reading
Comprehension Tests As Evaluation for Computer-Based Language Understanding
Systems, Association for Computational Linguistics (2000)

``A maximum-entropy-inspired parser'' Proceedings of the 2000 Conference of the North

American Chapter of the Assocation for Computational Linguistics, ACL New Brunswick
NJ (2000)

``Assigning function tags to parsed text'' (with Don Blaheta) Proceedings of the 2000
Conference of the North American Chapter of the Assocation for Computational
Linguistics, ACL, New Brunswick NJ (2000)

``Measuring efficiency in high-accuracy, broad-coverage statistical parsing'' (with Brian

Roark) Proceedings of the COLING-2000 Workshop on Efficiency in Large-scale Parsing
Systems (2000)

"Immediate-head parsing for language models" Proceedings of the Association for 2001
(2001 Computational Linguistics) (Best paper award)

"Unsupervised learning of name structure from co-reference data" Proceedings of the

North American Association for Computational Linguistics 2001, pp. 48-54 (2001)

"Edit detection and parsing for transcribed speech" (with Mark Johnson), Proceedings of
the North American Association for Computational Linguistics 2001, pp. 118-126 (2001)

"Entropy Rate Constancy in Text" (with Dmitriy Genzel) Proceedings of the Association
for Computational Linguistics 2002

"Parsing and Disfluency Placement" (with Donald Engel and Mark Johnson)
Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Syntax-based Language Models for Statistical Machine Translation with Kevin Knight
and Kenji Yamada, Machine Translation Summit IX, 2003.

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 Variation of Entropy and Parse Trees of Sentences as a Function of the Sentence
Number with Dmitriy Genzel, 2003 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing.

A TAG-based noisy-channel model of speech repairs, 2004 Conference of the

Association for Computational Linguistics (with Mark Johnson)

``Coarse-to-fine n-best Parsing and MaxEnt

Discriminative Reranking'', by Eugene Charniak and Mark Johnson,
Proceedings of the 2005 Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics, 2005

``Supervised and Unsupervised Learning for Sentences

Compression'',
by Jenine Turner and Eugene Charniak,
Proceedings of the 2005 Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics, 2005

Parsing Biomedical Literature, by Matt Lease and Eugene Charniak

International Joint Conference on Natural-Language Processing, 2005

Effective Use of Prosody in Parsing Conversational Speech

Jeremy G. Kahn, Matthew Lease, Eugene Charniak, Mark Johnson and Mari
Ostendorf, 2005

Human Language Technology/Empirical Methods in Natural Language

Processing (HLT/EMNLP), 2005

Parsing and its Applications for Conversational Speech

Technical Reports

``CARPS, A Program Which Solves Calculus Word Problems,'' MAC-TR-51 (Thesis),

Project MAC, M.I.T. (1968).

``Micro-Planner Reference Manual'' (with G.J. Sussman and T. Winograd), A.I. Memo
203A, M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1971).

``Toward a Model of Children's Story Comprehension,'' TR-266, M.I.T.

Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1972).

``He Will Make You Take it Back, A Study in the Pragmatics of Language,'' Technical
Report 6, Institute of Semantic and Cognitive Studies, Castagnola, Switzerland (1974).

``A Brief on Case,'' Technical Report 22, Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies,
Castagnola, Switzerland (1975).

``On the Referential/Attributive Distinction,'' Technical Report 24, Institute for Semantic
and Cognitive Studies, Geneva, Switzerland (1976).

``Micro-SAM and Micro-ELI: Exercises in Popular Cognitive Mechanics'' (with C.

Riesbeck), Research Report 139, Yale University Artificial Intelligence Project (1978).

``Type Checking in LISP,'' Technical Report No. CS-58, Department of Computer

Science, Brown University (1979).

7
 ``The Frail/Nasl Reference Manual'' (with Michael K. Gavin and James Hendler),
Technical Report No. CS-83-06, Department of Computer Science, Brown University
(1983).

`Knowledge Representation and the Plan-Recognition-as-Planning Theory,''

Technical Report No. CS-85-01, Department of Computer Science, Brown
University (1985).

``Probabilistic Semantics for Cost-Based Abduction'' (with Solomon E. Shimony),

Technical Report No. CS-90-02, Department of Computer Science, Brown
University (1990).

``A New Admissible Heuristic for Minimal-Cost Proofs'' (with Saadia Husain),
Technical Report No. CS-91-11, Department of Computer Science, Brown University
(1991).

``Probabilistic Abduction for Plan Recognition'' (with Robert Goldman),

Technical Report No. CS-91-12, Department of Computer Science, Brown University
(1991).

`A Probabilistic Analysis of Marker-Passing Techniques for Plan Recognition''

(with Glenn Carroll), Technical Report No. CS-91-44, Department of Computer
Science, Brown University (1991).

``Two Experiments on Learning Probabilistic Dependency Grammars from Corpora''

(with Glenn Carroll), Technical Report No. CS-92-16, Department of Computer
Science, Brown University (1992).

`Taggers for Parsers'' (with J. Adcock, G. Carroll, A. Cassandra, Y. Gotoh,

J. Katz, M. Littman, J. McCann), Technical Report No. CS-94-06, Department
of Computer Science, Brown University (1994).

`Context-Sensitive Statistics for Improved Grammatical Language Models''

(with Glenn Carroll), Technical Report No. CS-94-07, Department of Computer
Science, Brown University (1994).

``Parsing with Context-Free Grammars and Word Statistics,'' Technical Report No.
CS-95-28, Department of Computer Science, Brown University (1995).

``A Statistical Syntactic Disambiguation Program and What it Learns''

(with Murat Ersan), Technical Report No. CS-95-29, Department of Computer
Science, Brown University (1995).

``Expected-Frequency Interpolation,'' Technical Report No. CS-96-37,

Department of Computer Science, Brown University (1996).

Book Reviews

``How to Register Dissatisfaction with AI,'' \fIThe Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1)
(1979).

Review of ``Readings in Uncertain Reasoning,'' \fICanadian Artificial Intelligence

(28), pp. 25-27 (1991).

Invited Lectures

8
1972 Stanford University
Rutgers University

1973 Carnegie-Mellon Workshop on the Representation of Knowledge

Milan Polytech

1973,74,75 IBM European Advanced Education Institute

1974 Zurich Polytech

Lausanne Polytech
Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behavior (AISB) Conference,
Sussex
1975 NATO Summer School on the Representation of Knowledge, Santa
Cruz
AISB Summer School, Cambridge, England
University of Edinburgh
University of Amsterdam
Catholic University, Nijmegen
University of Leyden

1976 University of Bern

University of Bielefeld
University of Cologne
Workshop on Semantic Representation, Bonas, France

1977 Psycholinguistics Seminar, University of Geneva

French National Research Center, Paris
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Bad Honeff, Germany
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Maryland

1978 University of Rochester

Bolt, Beranek and Newman

1979 Raytheon Corporation

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of New Hampshire

1980 Carnegie-Mellon University

University of Connecticut

1981 Hewlett-Packard
Bolt, Beranek and Newman

1982 Natural Language Parsing Workshop, Essex, England

Conference on the Philosophy of Computation, Brown University

1983 Rhode Island College

Yale University
National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Workshop on Unsupervised Image Classification, Brown University
University of Rochester

1984 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Hudson Valley SIGART and Vassar College

9
 Ohio SIGART and Air Force Institute of Technology

1985 Central Florida State University (Distinguished Lecture Series)

Columbia University
Digital Equipment Corporation
New Mexico State University

1986 St. John's College

Carnegie-Mellon University
Boston University
National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Mitre Corporation
Fall Joint Computer Conference

1987 Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing-3

Yale University
Digital Equipment Corporation
ACM Computer Science Conference (Keynote Speaker)

1988 Philosophy of Cognitive Science Series - Brown University

University of California, Berkeley
Xerox Parc
SRI International
University of California, Irvine
University of California, Los Angeles
Workshop on Planning Recognition, AAAI 1988
Rochester Planning Workshop
Rome Connectionist Natural Language Workshop

1989 General Electric

University of Sussex
Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science
Imperial College - London
Penn State University (Distinguished Lecture Series)
IJCAI Workshop on Plan Recognition
Workshop on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence

1990 University of Chicago

Northwestern University
Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium
Connectionism Workshop, University of Pennsylvania

1991 Curriculum Workshop, M.I.T.

University of Rochester
Second International Colloquium on Cognitive Science, San Sebastian,
Spain

AI Curriculum Workshop, Holy Cross

US Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence,
Washington, DC

1992 Louisiana State University

Tulane University

1993 AAAI Invited Lecture

AAAI Tutorial

10
1994 University of Toronto
Carnegie-Mellon University
Brown University Department of Cognitive Science

1995 Cornell University

Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium
Southern Methodist University
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal,
Canada
IJCAI Workshop on New Methods in Language Learning
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Third Natural Language Processing Pacific-Rim Symposium, Seoul,
Korea

1996 University of Pennsylvania

1997 University of Utah (Distinguished Lecture Series)

University of Rochester
Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (Banquet Speaker)
Johns Hopkins University

1998 University of Maryland

Machines that Think Conference (Snowbird)
Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)

1999 Johns Hopkins University

ASIS 1999 Annual Conference
Brown Humanities Institute
CUNY Sentence Processing Conference

2000 International Biometric Society East North America Region ( AR)

Stanford University
AI'2000 - The Canadian Artificial Intelligence Conference for 2000
Johns Hopkins Summer Workshop
Microsoft
Institute for Mathematics and its Applications

2001 University of Saarbruken

University of Bonn
AT&T Labs
Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence Conference

2002 Educational Testing Service

Brown SUMS Conference (Undergraduate Mathematics).
Johns Hopkins (CLSP Summer School)
Columbia University Distinguished Lecture Series

2003 Fourth International Conference on Parsing Technology University of

Rochester

2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2005 Google
Matesius Lecture Speaker - Charles University, Prague

11
 ISI/UCLA Distinguished Lecture Series
Johns Hopkins

Invited Workshop Papers:

2004 An enhanced model for recognizing disfluencies in conversational

speech Rich-Text Worshop 2004 (with Mark Johnson and Matt Lease)

Papers Read

1967 First Joint International Conference on Artificial Intelligence

1972 Conference on Natural Language Processing, NYU

1973 Third Joint International Conference on Artificial Intelligence

1975 Workshop on Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, MIT

1977 Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

1978 Second Workshop on Theoretical Issues in Natural Language

Processing, U. Illinois

1979 Workshop on ``Dense Representations,'' University of California,

San Diego
Twelfth Annual Mathematical Psychology Meeting, Providence, RI
Representation des connaissances et raisonnement dans les sciences de
l'homme et de la socie 'te ', Saint-Maximin
ACM National Conference

1981 Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

1982 Cognitive Science Curriculum Conference, U. Rochester

Conference of the Philosophy of Computation, Brown U.

1983 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence

1985 Workshop on Connectionist Symbol Processing

1986 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence

1988 Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1989 Eleventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence,

Workshop on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence

1990 Informatics Curricula for the 1990's

National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence

1993 AAAI

1994 AAAI

6. Research in Progress

12
Eugene Charniak's research has always concerned computer
comprehension of natural language. Lately he has been concentrating
on the problem of language learning through statistical methods. The
statistical analysis of language has become more and more interesting
with the increases in computer power/memory and the increasing
availability of on-line corpora. Currently, Charniak and his students
are conducting experiments in learning probabilistic context-free
grammars (PCFG) for English from such corpora. A PCFG is a
context-free grammar which also has a probability associated with each
rule that is interpreted as the probability of the
left-hand side non-terminal being expanded using this rule (as opposed
to the other rules that could be used to expand it). There is a
standard technique for ``tuning'' PCFGs so that the associated
probabilities match the data as closely as possible. This technique,
along with restrictions on the possible form of a rule, allow one
in effect to propose all possible rules and then eliminate the ones
that after tuning have zero probability. Unfortunately, the tuning
technique only finds a locally optimal set of probabilities, and thus
one needs further information, the ``bias,'' so that the locally
optimal set is the desired set. This research is interesting both
because of the light it may shed on how much bias is actually
required and because the end product, a reasonably robust grammar for
English, is a prerequisite for further research in the area. In
particular, given a robust parsing scheme, we can now start to look at
more semantic issues like selectional restrictions on the arguments
of verbs or of adjectives. That is, we develop semantic
classes such as the things which can be the direct object of ``eat''
(presumably these would be mostly food). The end result of such
experimentation is statistical language models
that can be used to improve speech-comprehension programs, help
``stuff'' databases with information from news articles, or translate
languages.

7. Service

To the University

1978-1980 Colloquia Chairman, Program in Computer Science

1978-1980 Co-organizer, Artificial Intelligence Lecture Series

1980-1986 Executive Committee, Center for Cognitive Science

1980-1981 Freshman Advisor, Department of Computer Science

1981-1984 Graduate Advisor, Department of Computer Science

1981-1988 Chairman, Graduate Admissions Committee

1988-1990 Deans Scholarship Committee

1988-1991 Graduate Advisor

13
 1989-1991 Committe on Nominations

1991-1997 Chair, Department of Computer Science

1999- Lectureship Committee

2003 Chair, Undergraduate Recruitment Committee

2004 Chair, Undergraduate Recruitment Committee

2005 Undergraduate recruitment.

Faculty search committee.
Facilities committee.

To the profession

1969- Referee, International Joint Conferences on

Artificial Intelligence

1977- Associate Commentator,

The Behavioral and Brain Sciences

1977-1984 Editor,
Cognitive Science

1978-NSF Reviewer, Intelligent Systems

1979-1984 Editorial Advisory Board,

Cognition and Brain Theory

1980- NSF Reviewer, Information Science and Technology

1980-1981 Program Committee, Seventh International Joint

Conference on Artificial Intelligence

1982-1986 Editorial Board, Studies in Natural Language Processing

Cambridge University Press

1983-1986 Board, American Association for Artificial Intelligence

1984-1996 Editorial Board, \fICognitive Science

1988 ACL Conference Program Committee

AAAI Conference Program Committee
Editorial Board, Computational Linguistics

1988-1989 Knowledge Representation Conference Program Committee

1989 Reviewer, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

1990 Site Reviewer, New York State Education Department, Doctoral

Evaluation Project

1992 Reviewer, NSF 1993 Undergraduate Course and Curriculum

Development Program

14
 1994 Program Committee, AAAI
Best Paper Committee, AAAI

1996 Evaluation Panel Member for the Presidential Faculty Fellows

Program, NSF
Program Committee, Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing
Site Reviewer, Linguistic Data Consortium

1997 Editorial Board, Journal of AI Research

1997 Local Arrangements Chair EMNLP-97

Program Committee ACL 97

1998 Program Chair, Workshop on Very Large Corpora

1999 ACL99 Reviewer

NSF Site visitor

2001 Program Co-chair ACL-2002

Program Co-chair Conference of the Association for Computational
Linguistics 2002 (ACL-2002)
Reviewer Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural-Language
Processing 2002 (EMNLP-02)

2003 Program committees: 2003 Meeting of the North American Chapter of

the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2003 Conference on
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2003 Conference
of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Advisory committee, Johns Hopkins Summer Workshop.

2004 Program committees: 2004 Meeting of the North American Chapter of

the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2004 Conference on
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2004 Conference
of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

2005 ACL reviewer

Disfluency In Spontanious Speech Conference reviewer
Conference on Natural-Language Learning (CONLL) reviewer

8. Academic Honors, Research Grants, Fellowships and Honorary Societies

Honors

1967 A.B. with Honors, University of Chicago

National Science Foundation Fellowship
Sigma Xi

1990 Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence,

founding member

Research Grants

15
 1979-1980 NSF, ``Computer Science and Computer Engineering Research
Equipment'', $55,096.

1979-1988 ONR, ``The Computer Solution of Word Problems in Inventory

Control as a First Step Toward a Program Which Learns from
Textbooks'', $464,626.

1980-1985 ONR, ``Automated Technical Documentation and Assistance'' (Co-

Principal Investigator with A. van Dam), $891,084.

1981-1984 NSF, ``Research on Natural Language Processing (Frame

Selection)'', $131,920.

1982-1987 NSF, ``An Integrated Experimental Environment for Research in

Computer Science' (Co-principal investigator with A. van Dam, J.E.
Savage, P. Wegner, R. Sedgewick, T.W. Doeppner, S.P. Reiss, J.S.
Vitter and P.C. Kanellakis), $2,771,311.

1983-1985 DARPA/ONR, ``Ideographics'' (Co-principal investigator with J.E.

Savage, A. van Dam, G.M. Baudet, B.M. Chazelle, T.W Doeppner,
P.C. Kanellakis, S.P. Reiss,R. Sedgewick, J.S. Vitter and P. Wegner),
$700,000.

1983-1986 ITT, ``Digital Design Understanding as Motivation Comprehension,''

$49,600.

1986-1989 NSF, ``A Single-Semantic-Process Theory of Parsing,'' $295,240.

1985-1987 NSF, ``An Approach to Abductive Inference in Artificial Intelligence

Systems,'' $120,818.

1988-1990 ONR, ``Language Comprehension,'' $171,895.

1988-1993 NSF, ``Multiparadigm Design Environments,'' $3,469,574 (Co-PI).

1989-1992 NSF, ``A Probabilistic Approach to Natural Language Understanding,''

$180,000.

1990-1993 ONR, ``A Probabilistic Approach to Text Understanding,'' $277,879.

1991-1994 DARPA, ``High-Performance Computing Environments,'' $2,697,175.

1994-1997 NSF, ``Improved Statistical Language Models,'' $224,914.

1996-1999 ONR, ``AI Approaches to Statistical Language Models,'' $304,384.

1997-2000 NSF, ``Structured Statistical Learning''(with M. Johnson, J. Donoghue,

S. Geman, and D. Mumford), $775,420.

2000-2004 NSF, "Robust Knowledge Discovery from Parallel Speech and Text"
(with large group from Brown, Johns Hopkins, etc.) $300,000.

2001-2004 NSF-ITR Learning Syntastic Semantic Knowledge for Parsing

($500,000)

9. Teaching

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 1993-94 Natural Language Understanding (CS241) (6)

1994-95 Statistical Models in Natural-Language Processing (CS241) (8)

1995-96 Statistical Models in Natural-Language Processing (CS241) (10)

1996-97 Statistical Models in Natural-Language Processing (CS241) (11)

Syllabus: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs241

1997-98 Statistical Models in Natural-Language Processing (CS241) (12)

1998-99 Concepts & Challenges of Computer Science (CS2)

My home page is http://www.cs.brown.edu/~ec

2003-04 CS148: Robotics

CS241: Introduction to Statistical Language Processing

2004-05 CS051 Theory of Computation

CS148 Robotics
CS241 Introduction to Statistical Language Processing

2005-06 CS051
CS241
.

Theses Directed

1981 Douglas Wong, ``On the Unification of Language Comprehension with

Problem Solving''

1983 Graeme Hirst, ``Semantic Interpretation Against Ambiguity''

1985 James Hendler, ``Integrating Marker-Passing and Problem-Solving:

A Spreading-Activation Approach to Improved Choice in Planning''

1987 Robert McCartney, ``Synthesizing Algorithms with Performance

Constraints''

1989 Mary Harper, ``The Representation of Noun Phrases in Logical Form''

1990 Randall J. Calistri, ``Classifying and Detecting Plan-Based

Misconceptions for Robust Plan Recognition''

Robert P. Goldman, ``A Probabilistic Approach to Language

Understanding''

Felix W. Yen, ``CI-2, A Logic for Plural Representation''

1991 Solomon E. Shimony, ``A Probabilistic Framework for Explanation''

1992 Eugene Santos, ``A Linear Constraint Satisfaction Approach for

Abductive Reasoning''

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 1995 Glenn A. Carroll, ``Learning Probabilistic Grammars for Language
Modeling''

2000 Niyu Ge, "An Approach to Anaphoric Pronouns"

2001 Sharon A. Caraballo, "Automatic Construction of a Hypernym-Labeled

Noun Hierarchy from Text"

2004 Donald P. Blaheta, Function Tagging

2005 Dmitriy Genzel Creating Algorithms for Parsers and

Tagers for Resource Poor Languages
Using a Related Resource-Rich Language"

10. Corpora and Research Materials

"BLLIP 1987-89 WSJ Corpus Release 1"

A two CD-ROM corpus consisting of a complete, Treebank-style parsing of the
three-year WSJ archive from the ACL/DCI corpus -- about 30 million words of
text. Distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). Together with
Don Blaheta, Niyu Ge, Keith Hall, John Hale and Mark Johnson

11. Date Prepared

January, 2006

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