Katherine M. Forbes-Riley
Email: forbesk@cs.pitt.edu
Paper Mail: 108
Curriculum Vitae: CV (.pdf)
Dissertation: Discourse Semantics
of S-Modifying Adverbials
Current Positions
I am an Instructor in the Computer Science Department at
I am a Research Associate at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), where my work contributes to the ITSPOKE project (led by Diane Litman). This project is building an Intelligent Tutoring SPOKEn dialogue system that detects and responds to student affective states during the tutoring sessions.
Research and Education
My research interests concern linguistics and computer science theories, philosophies, and algorithms, with a focus on their application to discourse and dialogue modeling.
I completed my Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics
at the University of
Pennsylvania in May 2003. I completed my M.S.E. in Computer and Information Science at the
At Penn, I became involved with the Penn D-LTAG project (c.f. Webber, Joshi, Stone and Knott, 1999), which builds a discourse model on top of an LTAG clause model by treating discourse connectives as predicates, akin to verbs at the clause level. Discourse connectives take clausal arguments, either structurally or anaphorically, based on behavioral and computational evidence. While at Penn, I helped to develop and implement the DLTAG discourse parser and to construct annotation schemes for studying the arguments of discourse connectives. Also at Penn, I was involved in the PROPBANK project (c.f. Kingsbury and Palmer, 2002), annotating the predicate-argument structure of verbs in the Penn English Treebank on top of their syntactic parse.
My dissertation extends the DLTAG model and draws on my work for PROPBANK project. First, I study the semantic and pragmatic mechanisms that underlie the anaphoricity of adverbial discourse connectives,and present a corpus-based analysis of the predicate argument structure of over 13,000 S-modifying adverbials in the Penn English Treebank. In particular, I showed that S-modifying adverbials will function as discourse connectives if some part of the interpretation of their internal semantic argument(s) yields an abstract object interpretation of a non-nominalized constituent in the discourse context, either through semantic mechanisms such as demonstrative reference (e.g. After that (discourse deixis)), relational semantics (e.g. in contrast (to that)), and prosodic focus (e.g. NOW (out of the set of all times)), or through pragmatic mechanisms such as Gricean implicature (e.g. In fact (conversational implicature: contextual evidence or mutual knowledge suggests that this is not in the set of facts). Second, I construct a syntax-semantic interface for DLTAG, showing how the compositional semantics of discourse connectives can be computed within the DLTAG model.
"Giant
Steps",
Publications
Dissertation
Discourse Semantics
of S-Modifying Adverbials, Ph.D. Dissertation,
Journal Papers
The Relative Impact of Student Affect on Performance Models in a Spoken Dialogue Tutoring System (with Mihai Rotaru and Diane Litman), User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (Special Issue on Affective Modeling and Adaptation), 18(1-2): 11-43, February 2008
Correlations betweeen Dialogue Acts and Learning in Spoken Tutoring Dialogues (with Diane Litman), Natural Language Engineering, 12(2): 161-176, June 2006
Recognizing Student Emotions and Attitudes on the Basis of Utterances in Spoken Tutoring Dialogues with both Human and Computer Tutors (with Diane Litman), Speech Communication, 48(5): 559-590, May 2006
Spoken Versus Typed Human and Computer Dialogue Tutoring (with Diane Litman, Carolyn Penstein Rose, Kurt VanLehn, Dumisizwe Bhembe and Scott Silliman), International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 16: 145-170, 2006
Computing Discourse Semantics: The Predicate-Argument Semantics of Discourse Connectives in D-LTAG (with Bonnie Webber and Aravind Joshi), Journal of Semantics, 23(1), February, 2006
A Short Introduction to the Penn Discourse Treebank (with Bonnie Webber, Aravind Joshi, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, and Alan Lee), Copenhagen Working Papers in Language and Speech Processing, In Press
D-LTAG System - Discourse Parsing with a Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (with Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Anoop Sarkar, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber), Journal of Language, Logic and Information, 12(3), 2003
Empirical Studies of Centering Shifts and Cue Phrases as Embedded Segment Boundary Markers (with Eleni Miltsakaki), In Elsi Kaiser (ed.), Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 7.2: Current work in linguistics, pp.39--57, 2002
Book Chapters
Analyzing dependencies between student certainness states and tutor responses in a spoken dialogue corpus (with Diane Litman), In Wolfgang Minker and Laila Dybkjaer, editors, Recent Trends in Discourse and Dialogue. Springer, 2008
The predicate-argument structure of discourse connectives: A corpus-based study (with Cassandre Creswell, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber), In Antonio Branco, Tony McEnery, and Ruslan Mitkov, editors, Anaphora Prodessing: Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Modeling. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005
Conference Papers, Workshop Papers, and
Invited Talks
Responding to Student Uncertainty during Computer Tutoring: A Preliminary Evaluation (with Diane Litman and Mihai Rotaru). In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS),Montreal, Canada, June.
Uncertainty Corpus: Resource to Study User Affect in Complex Spoken Dialogue Systems (with Diane Litman, Scott Silliman, and Amruta Purandare). In Proceedings of the 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Morocco, May-June.
Investigating Human Tutor Responses to Student Uncertainty for Adaptive System Development (with Diane Litman). In Proceedings Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Lisbon, Portugal, September 2007
Exploring Affect-Context Dependencies for Adaptive System Development (with Mihai Rotaru, Diane Litman, and Joel Tetreault). In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2007), Rochester, NY, April 2007
Comparing Linguistic Features for Modeling Learning in Computer Dialogue Tutoring (with Diane Litman, Amruta Purandare, Mihai Rotaru, and Joel Tetreault). In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), Los Angeles, CA, July 2007
Using System and User Performance Features to Improve Emotion Detection in Spoken Tutoring Dialogs (with Hua Ai, Diane J. Litman, Mihai Rotaru, Joel Tetreault, and Amruta Purandare). In Proceedings of Interspeech ICSLP, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006
Position Paper. In Online Proceedings of the Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRR Satellite Workshop of the Interspeech ICSLP Conference), Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006
Modelling User Satisfaction and Student Learning in a Spoken Dialogue Tutoring System with Generic, Tutoring, and User Affect Parameters (with Diane Litman). In Proceedings Human Language Technology Conference/North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics annual meeting (HLT-NAACL), New York City, June 2006
Comparing
Synthesized versus Pre-recorded Tutor Speech in an Intelligent Tutoring Spoken
Dialogue System (with Diane Litman, Scott Silliman, and Joel Tetreault). In
Proceeding of the 19th International
Using Bigrams to Identify Relationships Between Student
Certainness States and Tutor Responses in a Spoken Dialogue Corpus (with
Diane Litman), In Proceedings of the 6th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial),
Interactions
between Speech Recognition Problems and User Emotions (with Mihai Rotaru and Diane Litman), In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on
Speech Communication and Technology (INTERSPEECH/EUROSPEECH),
Correlating
Student Acoustic-Prosodic Profiles with Student Learning in Spoken Tutoring
Dialogues (with Diane Litman), In Proceedings of
the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology
(INTERSPEECH/EUROSPEECH),
Speech
Recognition Performance and Learning in Spoken Dialogue Tutoring (with
Diane Litman), In Proceedings of the 9th European
Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (INTERSPEECH/EUROSPEECH),
Dialogue-Learning Correlations in Spoken Dialogue Tutoring (with Diane Litman, Alison Huettner, and Art Ward), In Proceedings of the 12th
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED),
Annotating and Predicting Student Emotional States
in Spoken Tutoring Dialogues, Presentation at The Workshop at the
Syntax-Pragmatics Interface: A Tribute to Ellen Prince,
Spoken Versus Typed Human and Computer Dialogue Tutoring (with Diane Litman, Carolyn Rose, Kurt VanLehn, Dumisizwe Bhembe, and Scott Silliman), In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), Maceio, Brazil, August 2004
Predicting
Student Emotions in Computer-Human Tutoring Dialogues (with Diane Litman), In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL),
Computing Discourse Semantics in D-LTAG: An
Overview, Invited Talk at
Annotating
Student Emotional States in Spoken Tutoring Dialogues (with Diane Litman), In Proceedings of the 5th SIGdial
Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial),
Predicting Emotion in Spoken Dialogue from Multiple Knowledge Sources (with Diane Litman), In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology conference / North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT/NAACL), May 2004
Recognizing Emotions from Student Speech in Tutoring Dialogues (with Diane Litman), In Proceedings of the Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2003), December, 2003
Towards Emotion Prediction in Spoken Tutoring Dialogues (with Diane Litman and Scott Silliman), In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology conference / North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT/NAACL), June, 2003
A Comparison of Tutor and Student Behavior in Speech versus Text-Based Tutoring (with Carolyn Rosé, Diane Litman, Dumisizwe Bhembe, Scott Silliman, Ramesh Srivastava, and Kurt Van Lehn), In Proceedings of the HLT/NAACL Workshop: Building Educational Applications Using NLP, June 2003
Anaphoric Arguments of Discourse Connectives: Semantic Properties of Antecedents versus Non-Antecedents (with Cassandre Creswell, Eleni Miltsakaki, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber), In Proceedings of the Computational Treatment of Anaphora Workshop, EACL, 2003
The Discourse Anaphoric Properties of Connectives (with Cassandre Creswell, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber), In Proceedings of the 4th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium (DAARC), 2002
A Semantic
Account of Adverbials as Discourse Connectives (with Bonnie Webber), In
Proceedings of the 3rd SIGdial Workshop on Discourse
and Dialogue (SIGdial),
The Discourse Anaphoric Properties of Connectives (slides) (with Cassandre Creswell, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber, presented at The Penn-Tuebingen Workshop, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 2002
A
Semantics for Adverbial Discourse Connectives (slides) ,
presented at The Penn-Tuebingen Workshop,
D-LTAG System - Discourse Parsing with a Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (with Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Anoop Sarkar, Aravind Joshi and Bonnie Webber), In Proceedings of the ESSLI Workshop on Information Structure, Discourse Structure, and Discourse Semantics, 2001.
Semantic Redundancy in RST Relations, presented at
Discourse Seminar,
Rough Shifts as Indicators of Discourse Segment
Boundaries, presented at Discourse Seminar,
Composing Linguistic Actions: Abstracting Goals
from Dialogues, presented at Discourse Seminar,