[Colloquium] Talks at TTIC: ​Annie Louis, University of Edinburgh

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Wednesday, April 29th at 11am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:
​​
Annie Louis, University of Edinburgh

Title:       Supporting Information Access through Text Quality Prediction
and Automatic

​
​ ​
Summarization

Abstract:

When users look for information on the World Wide Web, not only do they
seek
relevant documents, but also desire information which is of high quality,
and
is organized, and summarized in an easy to digest format. In this talk, I
will
overview my work which focuses on providing natural language support for
creating richer search and browsing experiences for users.

First, I will describe work on automatically assessing the writing quality
of
documents. Well-written documents are obviously valuable to users. While
spelling
and grammar errors are detected easily by current systems, there are
numerous
other aspects of writing quality for which computational methods do not
exist. I
will present some models I have built to predict coherent, concise, and
popular
writing style. A distinguishing feature of these models is that they
automatically
obtain and use the structure of the document for analyzing its writing.

A large portion of web contents, however, do not follow the traditional
notion of
a document. Increasingly, users want to search online reviews, blogs,
discussion
boards, tweets, and comments on news articles. These social media text
appear as
multiple short snippets on a webpage. The posts are simply listed in
chronological
or popularity order with different subtopics all merged together. In the
second
part of the talk, I will describe work aiming to automatically uncover
aspects of
the hidden structure of web discussion forums and use this information to
summarize
the conversations. I will describe models which can group forum
participants,
and predict which solutions suggested in a task-oriented forum are easy or
difficult to carry out.


Bio:

Annie Louis is a Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh. In
2013, she
completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked for two
years as a
Newton International Fellow at the University of Edinburgh before starting
her
current position. Annie's interests lie in enriching information access
scenarios
with powerful natural language processing and machine learning techniques.
She
works on many aspects of the models and evaluation methods for text quality
prediction, automatic summarization, and discourse parsing.

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/alouis/


Host:  Karen Livescu, klivescu at ttic.edu
-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Coordinator,
Bookkeeper
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

TTIC
6045 S. Kenwood Ave.
Chicago, IL. 60637
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