Research Interests

My primary research areas are NLP and AI. I am interested in many aspects of Natural Language Processing like subjectivity and sentiment analysis, discourse, dialogs and multi-perspective question answering. I work with my advisor Janyce Wiebe on some of these. Here is my CV (updated on Feb'09)


News

Mar, 2009: Received the Best Graduate Student Research Award 2009, Computer Science Department, University of Pittsburgh

Mar, 2009: Received the Outstanding Paper Presentation Award at Grad Expo 2009, organized by the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh

Feb, 2009: Received the Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship for the year 2009-2010

Oct. 2, 2007: Research featured in the DHS Network Newsletter as Department of Homeland Security featured student

Data, Lexicon and OpinionFinder system released by the group at Pitt can be obtained here

2004: Received the Incoming Doctoral Student Fellowship , Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), University of Pittsburgh, 2004-2005.

 
Publications


Swapna Somasundaran and Janyce Wiebe, (2009), Recognizing Stances in Online Debates ,  ACL 2009: Joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, August 2-7, 2009, Singapore.


Swapna Somasundaran, Galileo Namata, Janyce Wiebe and Lise Getoor (2009) Supervised and Unsupervised Methods in Employing Discourse Relations for Improving Opinion Polarity Classification ,  EMNLP 2009: conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing August 6-7, 2009, Singapore.


Swapna Somasundaran, Galileo Namata, Lise Getoor and Janyce Wiebe, (2009) Opinion Graphs for Polarity and Discourse Classification , TextGraphs-4: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing, 7th August 2009, Singapore


Swapna Somasundaran, Janyce Wiebe and Josef Ruppenhofer (2008) Discourse Level Opinion Interpretation,  Coling, Manchester, 18-22 August, 2008


Swapna Somasundaran, Josef Ruppenhofer and Janyce Wiebe (2008) Discourse Level Opinion Relations: An Annotation Study, SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Columbus, Ohio,  June 2008


Josef Ruppenhofer, Swapna Somasundaran and Janyce Wiebe (2008)  Finding the Sources and Targets of Subjective Expressions. LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco.  


Swapna Somasundaran, Josef Ruppenhofer and Janyce Wiebe (2007)  Detecting Arguing and Sentiment in Meetings SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Antwerp, Belgium, September  2007


Swapna Somasundaran, Theresa Wilson, Janyce Wiebe and Veselin Stoyanov (2007) QA with Attitude: Exploiting Opinion Type Analysis for Improving Question Answering in On-line Discussions and the News, International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media March 26-28, 2007, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.


Swapna Somasundaran, Janyce Wiebe, Paul Hoffmann, Diane Litman  (2006).Manual Annotation of Opinion Categories in Meetings. ACL Workshop: Frontiers in Linguistically Annotated Corpora(Coling/ACL 2006) , Sydney, Australia


Theresa Wilson, Paul Hoffmann, Swapna Somasundaran, Jason Kessler, JanyceWiebe, Yejin Choi, Claire Cardie, Ellen Riloff, Siddharth Patwardhan (2005). OpinionFinder: A system for subjectivity analysis Demo in Human Language Technologies Conference/Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP 2005), Vancouver, Canada.


Teaching
 
Fall 2006
* Introduction to NLP (COURSE #2731 )
* Introduction to Artificial Intelligence ( COURSE #1571)
 
Fall 2005
* Introduction to NLP (COURSE #2731 )
* Discrete Structures for Computer Science (COURSE #0441 )


Coursework
   
Fall 07
Analysis of Social media (CMU)
 
Fall 06
Probabilistic Methods
 
Spring 06
Machine Learning
Advanced Topics in AI (Affective Spoken Dialogue Systems)
Research Experience In Computer Science

Fall 05
Computer Architecture
 
Spring 05
Design And Analysis of Algorithms
Computer Operating Systems
Advanced Topics in NLP (Discourse Processing and Pragmatics)
 
Fall 04
Research In Computer Science
Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

Summer 02 ( at JHU)
Computer Organization
 
Spring 02 ( at JHU)
Advanced Topics in Online algorithms
Information Retrieval and Web agents
Seminar in NLP
Computer Networks
Medical Informatics
Embedded systems and security

Fall 01 ( at JHU)
Database Systems
Introduction to NLP
Introduction to Algorithms






Misc
 
Swapna Somasundaran
Hi, I am a Doctoral candidate in the Computer Science department of the  University of Pittsburgh.

I am a member of the Natural Language Processing Group here.


 
Tel : 412-624-8842
 
Department of Computer Science
Rm. 5422 Sennott Square Building
210 S. Bouquet St.
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260