Hi all, I haven't been active on this list for quite a while. I'd like to first introduce myself to Ted's new students. Several years back, I was Ted's student at UMD, working on my MS thesis research in NLP -- specifically, word sense disambiguation and semantic relatedness of words and concepts. Since graduating from UMD, I have been pursuing at PhD at the University of Utah under the guidance of Dr. Ellen Riloff. I have continued to lurk on this list over the years, and have followed various discussions and achievements of students in this group. Occasionally, I send updates to Ted, and I thought I'd share this latest piece of news with the group as well:
I am happy to report that I successfully defended my PhD dissertation last week. I've been working on event-based information from text, and for my dissertation research I devised an approach based on "event recognition" for improving information extraction accuracy. I am still in the process of finalizing my dissertation, and I will be sure to send a link to the dissertation on this list once I have it done. I would like to express my gratitude to many of you in the NLP group at UMD for your support through this process. I would like especially thank Ted, Bano, Saif, Bridget and Amruta... you all have been extremely supportive, and I am very grateful for your support! In other related news, I just accepted an offer of employment at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a post-doctoral research associate. I will be working on the Jeopardy challenge: http://www.research.ibm.com/deepqa/index.shtml http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/27jeopardy.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=ibm%20jeopardy%20challenge&st=cse I will be starting work at IBM in the first week of October, and I'm looking forward to it. I remember there was some discussion about the Jeopardy challenge on this list a few months back. I will keep you all updated on the progress on this and on the DeepQA project. Hope to see you all soon. -- Sid.
