LTI Research Professor Lorraine Levin has been named to the 2015-2016 class of fellows for Executive Leadership in Academic Technology and Engineering (ELATE at Drexel®). Part of the International Center for Executive Leadership in Academics within the Institute for Women’s Health and Leadership® at Drexel University College of Medicine, ELATE is a one-year part-time national leadership development program designed to advance... Read More
Carnegie Mellon Phone Service Uses Funny Recordings To Make Anti-Ebola Health Messages "Go Viral" in Guinea
Halting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is no laughing matter, but a phone information service developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers is leveraging people's interest in phone games and wacky humor to help spread urgent health information in Guinea.
The phone project, called Polly, began operating in March through the U.S. Embassy in Guinea, where the current Ebola epidemic began in December 2013 and where people are still grappling with the outbreak. This week, Polly is part of an anti-Ebola campaign in... Read More
LTI Ph.D. candidate Manaal Faruqui won a Best Student Paper award from the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics — Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2015) for his work "Retrofitting Word Vectors to Semantic Lexicons." The paper proposes a method for refining vector space representations using relational information from semantic lexicons by encouraging linked words to have similar vector representations, and it makes no... Read More
MCDS student Chengliang Lian and LTI Ph.D. candidate Rui Liu took top honors in this semester's class project competition in 11-761: Language and Statistics.
Students in the course, which aims to ground the data-driven techniques used in language technologies in sound statistical methodology, must complete a substantial team project at the end of the semester. The project requires students to discover and exploit deficiencies in the... Read More
Associate Research Professor Eduard Hovy earned an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp last month for his holistic approach to automatic text summarization in natural language processing. "His efforts are turning this discipline into an international research field," they said.
In discussing Hovy's nomination, University of Antwerp Professor Walter Daelemans praised the far-reaching nature of Hovy's work — which impacts everything from cancer research and treatment to... Read More
Language Technologies Institute Ph.D. student Jun Araki has received a 2015-2016 IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award to support his ongoing research into event extraction and event coreference resolution.The intensely competitive IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards program honors exceptional Ph.D. students interested in solving problems that are both important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in fields like computer science and engineering, electrical and... Read More
Associate Professor Carolyn Rosé is on the lecture circuit this semester. The keynote lecture circuit, that is.Rosé, who holds joint appointments in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Language Technologies Institute, traveled to Atlanta earlier this month to deliver the keynote address at SEEDS, the Southeast Educational Data Symposium. The conference... Read More
Waleed Ammar, a Ph.D. student in the Language Technologies Institute, is one of two Carnegie Mellon University students and one of just 15 graduate students from across North America chosen as 2015 Google Ph.D. Fellows.
Justin Meza, a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, joins Ammar in this group of students that Google has identified as doing exceptional work on computer science and related... Read More
A patient walks into a doctor's office, complaining of a sore throat. After an initial exam, the doctor orders a culture and a few blood tests that she uses — along with the exam results and professional judgment — to make a fairly objective diagnosis.
But what about patients struggling with mental illnesses? There's no blood test for depression or anxiety, and diagnosis is often based on more subjective criteria.
Language Technologies Assistant Professor L.-P. Morency wants to change that.
A computer... Read More
Language Technologies Institute Professor Alex Waibel has been named a 2015 IEEE fellow in recognition of his technological contributions to society.The IEEE is the world's largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. The IEEE Board of Directors awards the rank of fellow to a person with an outstanding record of accomplishment.Waibel, who is also a professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of... Read More