6 MID-ATLANTIC STUDENT COLLOQUIUM ON SPEECH, LANGUAGE AND LEARNING

Saturday, May 6, 2017 8:40 AM – 7:00 PMB-1270 and Basement Level OneScience & Engineering Hall800 22nd St NW, Washington, DC

MASC-SLL 2017

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Welcome to the George Washington University’s new Science and Engineering Hall! This half-mil-lion square foot facility (designed by Ballinger) promotes collaboration and sustainability and is a major step towards GW’s goal of becoming a top-tiered research institution. The SEH is LEED “Gold” certified and has many innovative features includ-ing the living Green Wall, the central stairs support-ed by cables from the roof, and the Teaching Tow-er. Take a brief tour today to see more highlights!

George Washington University Science and Engineering Hall (SEH)800 22nd St NW, Washington, DC, 20052

General ChairShabnam Tafreshi (George Washington University)

Organizing CommitteeArman Cohan (Georgetown University)Sardar Hamidian (George Washington University)Pedram Hosseini (George Washington University)Ali Seyfi (George Washington University)

Program CommitteeWasi Ahmad (University of Virginia)Ashraf Bah Rabiou (University of Delawer)Pradeep Dasigi (Carnegie Mellon University)Ahmed Elgohary (University of Maryland)Noura Farra (Columbia University)Anupam Guha (University of Maryland)Pedram Hosseini (George Washington University)Valdis Jonsdottir (Princeton University)Abhay Kashyap (University of Maryland Baltimore County)Denys Katerenchuk (The City University of New York)Wuwei Lan (Ohio State University)Hongyuan Mei (Johns Hopkins University)Dipendra Misra (Cornell Tech)Courtney Napoles (Johns Hopkins University)Ellie Pavlick (University of Pennsylvania)Aria Pezashki (Food and Drug Administration)Adithya Renduchintala (Johns Hopkins University)Rashmi Sankepally (University of Maryland)João Sedoc (University of Pennsylvania)Huy Viet Nguyen (University of Pennsylvania)Yogarshi Vyas (University of Maryland)Shuo Zhang (Georgetown University)

Faculty AdvisersMona Diab (George Washington University)Nathan Schneider (Georgetown University)Amir Zeldes (Georgetown University)

COMMITTEE

PANELISTS• Mohamed AlTantawy, AGOLO, CTO/Co-Founder. Mohamed is a Computer Science Ph.D.

candidate at Columbia University in New York city. Agolo created the world’s most advanced summarization software to generate business intelligence reports in real-time. Agolo has been successfully deployed in investment banks, asset management, consultancies and media companies across the world. Mohamed interests at the intersection of NLP, ML and AI.

• Mark Dickison, Capital One, Technical and Modeling Lead for Capital One’s internal speech recognition team – SpeakEasy. He started his career as a Network Physicist – acquiring his Ph.D. from Boston University. This was followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Pennsylvania State in their USP program, which supports the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Leaving academia, he joined Booz Allen Hamilton as a Data Scientist, working with a variety of clients across health, finance, and energy. Mark started at Capital One as a data scientist and developer, Mark has been with the team through its entire journey from a single-instance proof of concept to its current enterprise-scale running in the cloud.

• Nazli Goharian, Georgetown University, Clinical Professor. She joined academia in 2000 (Illinois Institute of Technology) from industry, where she was the Project Manager for Data Warehouse Conferencing at MCI Worldcom. Her research, publications, and doctoral student mentorship span the domains of text search and mining. Her recent years interest has been on the medical/health domain text processing. She was awarded the College of Science and Letters Dean’s Excellence Award in Teaching and in 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2007, the Computer Science Department Teacher of the Year Award. In 2009, she was awarded the IIT Julia Beveridge Award for faculty (female faculty of the year). Since the start of the CS doctoral program at Georgetown (2011) she has founded & ran the Semi-Annual GU-CS Graduate Research Presentation Days.

• Halil Kilicoglu, National Institutes of Health, Staff Scientist. He has expertise in biomedical NLP and text mining; more specifically, his research focuses on semantic interpretation of biomedical text, question answering, and literature-based knowledge discovery. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from Concordia University in 2012.

• Philip Resnik, University of Maryland, Professor of Linguistics, with a joint appointment at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He is a computational linguist with core interests in computational social science and the modeling of human linguistic processes, and currently serves on the Executive Board of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). Outside academia, he has been active in industry (BBN, IBM, Sun Microsystems Labs), entrepreneurship (CodeRyte, acquired by 3M; React Labs), and consulting/advising (FiscalNote, Converseon). He earned his PhD in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993.

• Evelyne Tzoukermann, MITRE corporation, Principal Artificial Intelligence Engineer. Her research expertise spans over many areas, including speech processing technologies, multimedia extraction and retrieval, interdiscipliary research involving language and video, and data mining.was previously Research Director at StreamSage now COMCAST, where her research centered on speech indexing, speech-to-speech machine translation, information extraction, multimedia retrieval, and recommendation systems. Prior to that she spent several years at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, AT&T Bell Laboratories. Tzoukermann has over eight patents in information retrieval and video analysis and over 50 publications. Evelyne holds a Ph.D.in Computer Science and Linguistics from the Sorbonne in Paris, and was subsequently a Fulbright Scholar at Brown University.

7:30 - 8:40AM Registration & Breakfast 8:40 - 8:45AM Opening Remarks8:45 - 10:00AM Oral Presentation Session #1

1. Possession Semantics As Case Semantics Austin Blodgett and Nathan Schneider (Georgetown University)

2. Multi-embedding Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Sarcasm Classification Rohan Doshi and Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University)

3. Combining Spatial Clustering with LSTM Speech Models for Multichannel Speech Enhancement Felix Grezes, Zhaoheng Ni, Viet Anh Trinh and Michael Mandel (The City University of New York)

4. Fatorization Bandits for Interactive Recommendation Huazheng Wang, Qingyun Wu and Hongning Wang (University of Virginia)

5. Hedge Detection with Word2Vec Word Disambiguation Model Denys Katerenchuk (The City University of New York)

10:00 - 10:30AM Coffee Break & SEH Tour10:30 - 11:45AM Oral Presentation Session #2

6. A Continuously Growing Dataset of Sentential Paraphrases Wuwei Lan, Siyu Qiu, Hua He and Wei Xu (Ohio State University)

7. Quantifying and Removing Implicit Human Bias from Vision-and-Language Models Jieyu Zhao, Mark Yatskar, Tianlu Wang, Vicente Ordonez and Kai-Wei Chang (University of Virginia)

8. Are you asking the right questions? Automatically Generating Clarification Questions Sudha Rao and Hal Daumé III (University of Maryland, College Park)

9. Learning Antonyms with Paraphrases and a Morphology Aware Neural Network Sneha Rajana and Chris Callison-Burch (University of Pennsylvania)

10. Contextual Bandits in A Collaborative Environment Qingyun Wu, Huazheng Wang, Quangquan Gu and Hongning Wang (University of Virginia).

11:45 - 12:15PM Comcast Voice Control Platform, Vikrant Sagar12:15- 14:00PM Lunch & Poster Session #114:00 - 15:15PM Oral Presentation Session #311. Learning to Rank for Consumer Health Search: a Semantic Approach

Luca Soldaini and Nazli Goharian (Georgetown University)12. Active Learning for Low-Resource Speech Recognition: Impact of Selection Size and Language

Modeling Data Ali Syed, Andrew Rosenberg and Michael Mandel (The City University of New York)

13. Predicting Twitter User Demographics from a Single Tweet with Recurrent Neural Networks Zach Wood-Doughty, Rebecca Marvin, Nicholas Andrews and Mark Dredze (Johns Hopkins University)

14. Dialects and Similar Languages Detection: Artificial NN vs. Conventional Supervised Classifiers Ayah Zirikly, Bart Desmet and Mona Diab (George Washington University)

15. Semantic Evaluation of Cross-lingual Word Representations Within and Across Languages Alexander Zhang, Yogarshi Vyas and Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland, College Park)

15:15 - 16:15PM Coffee Break & GW NLP Lab Tour16:15 - 17:15PM “Life after PhD”, Panel DiscussionMohamed AlTantawy, Mark Dickison, Nazli Goharian, Halil Kilicoglu, Philip Resnik, and Evelyne Tzoukermann

17:15 - 17:30PM Closing Remarks17:30 - 17:45PM Poster Session #2 Setup17:45 - 19:00PM Light Dinner & Poster Session #2

PROGRAM & PRESENTATIONS

POSTERS

1. Attend, Compare and Aggregate: A Deep Neural Approach for Natural Language InferenceWasi Ahmad, Renqin Cai and Chao Jiang (University of Virginia)2. Arabic Textual Entailment with Word EmbeddingsNada Almarwani and Mona Diab (George Washington University)3. Hard Pointer NetworksLawrence Chan and Joao Sedoc (University of Pennsylvania)4. An Attention Model for Categorizing Patient Safety EventsArman Cohan, Allan Fong, Nazli Goharian and Raj Ratwani (Georgetown University and Medstar)5. Modeling Topical Correspondence with Word Embeddings in Commented News DataRenqin Cai and Hongning Wang (University of Virginia)6. A Case Study on Low Resource Neural Machine Translation: Translating TED talks from English to VietnamesePhong Dinh and Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland)7. LILI: A Simple Language Independent Approach for Language IdentificationMohamed Elbadrashiny and Mona Diab (George Washington University)8. Learning Monolingual Compositional Representations via Bilingual SupervisionAhmed Elgohary and Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland)9. Part of Speech Tagging for Code Switched DataFahad Ghamdi, Mona Diab, Giovanni Molina, Thamar Solorio, Abdelati Hawwari, Victor Soto and Julia Hirschberg (George Washington University and Columbia University)10. Machine Learning Applied to Insider Fraud Detection for Point-Of-Sale TransactionsChristine Hines and Abdou Youssef (George Washington University)11. Developing Sentiment Analysis Resources for PersianPedram Hosseini (George Washington University)12. Domain Specific Fact Checking on Social MediaSardar Hamidian (George Washington University)13. Laryngeal Specifications of Breathy-voiced Stops: Variation in Bangla Complicates the PhenomenonMd Jahurul Islam (Georgetown University)14. PU-Learning for Learning Word Embedding with Side InformationChao Jiang, Hsiang-Fu Yu, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Akshay Balwally and Kai-Wei Chang (University of Virginia and University of Texas)15. Predictive Linguistic Features of Schizophrenia Efsun Kayi, Luca Pauselli, Michael Compton, Glen Coppersmith and Mona Diab (George Washington University)16. Global Constraints on Entailment Types in the Paraphrase DatabaseReno Kriz and Chris Callison-Burch (University of Pennsylvania)17. A Framework for Cross-Domain Clinical Temporal Information ExtractionSean MacAvaney, Arman Cohan and Nazli Goharian (Georgetown University)18. Verbal Antecedents for ‘This’ and ‘That’ Emma Manning (Georgetown University)19. THYME Annotation via Abstract Meaning Representation AugmentationSean MacAvaney, Nathan Schneider and Nazli Goharian (Georgetown University)

Session #1: 12:15 - 14:00PM Location: Basement level of Science & Engineering Hall

20. ``Hey Dude” or ``Dear Sir”?: Modeling Lexical Formality for Downstream ApplicationsXing Niu, Marianna Martindale and Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland)21. Speaker Diarization for Automatic Speech RecognitionVimal Manohar (Johns Hopkins University)22. Generating automatic pseudo-entailments from AMR parsesAdam Poliak and Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins University)23. A recommendation system to match college events to studentsKazem Qazanfari and Abdou Youssef (George Washington University)24. Reconstructing Thread Structure For Reddit CommentsSean Simpson (Georgetown University)25. Predicting Emotional Word Ratings using Distributional Representations and Signed ClusteringJoão Sedoc and Aline Normoyle (University of Pennsylvania)26. Structured Prediction via Learning to Search under Bandit FeedbackAmr Sharaf and Hal Daume (University of Maryland)27. Capturing the Human Nuances of Optimism using Discourse Relations and Explanatory Style RecognitionYoungseo Son, Nipun Bayas and Hansen Schwartz (Stony Brook University)28. Searching for Coreferent MentionsRashmi Sankepally, Tongfei Chen, Douglas Oard, Dawn Lawrie, Tim Finin, James Mayfield and Bejamin Van Durme (University of Maryland)29. Unsupervised Induction of Word Connotation from Large CorporaBarbara Vasilchenko and Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland)30. Detecting Lexical Entailment in ContextYogarshi Vyas and Marine Carpuat (University of Maryland)31. Food ordering or chatting: Food, gender, and family at a restaurantPing-Hsuan Wang (Georgetown University)32. SHELL: Scoring Human-like Errors in generated LanguageBryan Wilkinson, Ashwinkumar Ganesan and Tim Oates (University of Maryland Baltimore County)33. What else is there? Deep multi-label prediction under incomplete labelsTianlu Wang, Ali Farhadi and Vicente Ordonez (University of Virginia and Washington University)34. Zipporah, an Automatic Data Cleaning System for Noisy Web-Crawled Parallel CorporaHainan Xu and Philipp Koehn (Johns Hopkins University)35. Investigate Naturalness of Mandarin TTS using SSMLWenxi Yang (Georgetown University)36. Generating Visually Descriptive Language from Abstract Scene LayoutsXuwang Yin and Vicente Ordonez (University of Virginia)37. Mining Mandarin Tone Syllable N-grams Through Time-serie Subsequence Pattern Network AnalysisShuo Zhang (Georgetown University)38. Combining Structured Features with Language to Predict the Real Estate MarketMohammadzaman Zamani and Hansen Andrew Schwartz (Stony Brook University)39. A Modular Template Matching Approach for VQA Md Rizwan Parvez, Tolga Bolukbasi, Venkatesh Saligrama and Kai-Wei Chang(University of Virginia)

POSTERSSession #2: 17:45 - 19:00PM Location: Basement level of Science & Engineering Hall

Session #1: 12:15 - 14:00PM Location: Basement level of Science & Engineering Hall

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