Donna Byron  

publications

projects

colleagues

about me

Professional Colleagues

  At Northeastern

I currently work in the Relational Agents Group at Northeastern University. The lab is headed by Tim Bickmore and staffed by a great group of students.
    I am also conducting a study, funded under NSF award IIS-0835396, that brings psycholinguistic findings to bear on dialog systems design. The project is a collaborative effort with Joy Hanna at Oberlin College.
      I am also a co-organizer of the GIVE-2 challenge: Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments. This is a shared task to stimulate research in natural language generation in virtual environments. The task involves creating software that generates instructions for a user moving within a virtual world to reach several target objects in the correct order. Software and a description of the GIVE-2 challenge is on Give-challenge.org and a report from the first GIVE challenge, in 2009, was created as part of the workshop proceedings for ENLG 2009, in Athens.

          At Ohio State University

        Prior to coming to Northeastern, I co-directed the Speech and Language Technologies lab at Ohio State University. I still collaborate with Eric Fosler-Lussier at OSU. Two of my former graduate students have moved on to bigger and better things:

        • Tianfang Xu (ABD) is now at Microsoft in Redmond, WA.
        • Laura Stoia (Ph.D., 2007) is now at Google in Mountain View, CA.

          Other places I have worked

        Before coming to OSU, I was a member of the Conversational Interaction and Spoken Dialogue Research Group at the University of Rochester from 1996 until 2002. I worked for James Allen on the TRIPS-Pacifica, TRIPS-911, and Medadvisor systems.

        I was supported for the summer of 2002 by Michael Tanenhaus and I continue to collaborate with Mike and Sarah Brown-Schmidt on psycholinguistics research.

        In the summer of 2000, I was a research intern at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in the Information Retrieval and Analysis Group. My supervisor was Jim Cooper.

          Professional Society Affiliations

        • Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
        • American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
        • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

          Conference Organization and Program Committee Service

        • Co-Program Chair of the 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial 2009)
        • Program Committee for the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2009), Singapore.
        • PC member for the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009), Athens, Greece.
        • Co-organizer for the GIVE Challege 2008: Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments (a shared task with workshop meeting at EACL 2009)
        • Local Arrangements committee member for the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2008), Columbus, Ohio.
        • PC member for the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2008), March, 2008, Athens, Greece.
        • PC member for the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2008), October 2008, Honolulu, Hawaii.
        • Senior PC member for the North American Chapter of the ACL, Human Language Technologies conference (NAACL/HLT 2007), April 2007, Rochester, New York.
        • PC Member for the Sixth Discourse Anaphor and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium (DAARC 2007), March 2007, Lagos, Portugal.
        • PC Member for the Human Language Technology conference (HLT'06), July 2006, New York City.
        • PC Member for the 11th meeting of the European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL '06), April, 2006, Trento, Italy.
        • PC member for the Computational Linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics combined meeting (COLING/ACL 2006), July 2006, Sydney, Australia
        • PC member for the first conference on Spoken Language Technolgoy (SLT'06)
        • PC member, joint conference on Human Language Technology and the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL'06)
        • PC member, 11th meeting of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL'06)
        • PC member, ASRU'05, 2005 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, Cancun, Mexico, Nov. 27 - Dec. 1, 2005.
        • PC member and Demo session co-chair, HLT/EMNLP Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Vancouver, Canada, October 6-8, 2005.
        • PC Member ACL'05 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 25 - 30, 2005.
        • Co-Chair, Workshop on Discourse Annotation at ACL'04, Barcelona, Spain, July 25-26, 2004.
        • PC member, ACL 2004, 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Barcelona, Spain, July 20-26, 2004.
        • PC member, Workshop on Reference Resolution and its Applications, Barcelona, Spain, July 25-26, 2004.
        • PC member, DAARC2004 The 5th International Conference on Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution, San Miguel, Portugal, Sept. 23 - 24, 2004.
        • PC member ASRU 2003, the IEEE Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands Nov. 30 - Dec. 4, 2003.
        • PC member, SIGDIAL 2003 The 4th Sigdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialog, Sapporo, Japan, July 5-6, 2003.
        • Panelist, the 4th annual Student Research Worshop at ACL 2003
        • PC member, ACL2003, the 41st annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sapporo, Japan, July 7 - 12, 2003.
        • PC member, 2003 International Symposium on Reference Resolution and Its Applications to Question Answering and Summarization, Venice, Italy, June 23 - 24, 2003.
        • PC member, 2002 International Symposium on Reference Resolution for Natural Language Processing, Alicante, Spain, June 3-4, 2002.
        Last modified: Thu Aug 4 17:20:18 EDT 2005 by dbyron