Myr Myroslava Dzikovska

Publications and research

Adviser:

James Allen

Research interests

Natural language understanding, spoken dialogue, statistical NLP, knowledge representation and reasoning

Curriculum Vitae (PDF format)

PhD Thesis (PDF format)

My thesis research deals with representing lexical semantic properties of words using semantic features and learning semantic features(properties) of words with statistical methods. I recently defended a thesis proposal, proposing to develop a set of algorithms to learn and utilize lexical semantic feature sets in parsing. Among other things, I'm planning to use a log-linear model in conjunction with expectation maximization to learn feature sets associated with words and dependencies within feature sets.

I'm actively involved in the Conversational Interaction and Spoken Dialogue research group , developing multimodal dialogue systems. Currently we are working on the TRIPS system , an interactive planing assistant capable of understanding spoken language. My most recent project is developing an algorithm to automatically adapt generic system lexicon to the application domains.

I spent the summer of 2001 at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories working with Candace Sidner to get a small robot gesture naturally synchronized in speech. I connected it to COLLAGEN, a collaborative agent developed at MERL.

My first project was on robust parsing in the system, but we quickly discovered that the methods successfully used previously in the smaller TRAINS domain were not working properly in a larger domain, and the lexical information in the lexicon was insufficient to extend them appropriately. Since then I worked on the new design for TRIPS lexicon that would improve parsing, support robustness capability, and would make it easier to port the system to new domains. I was mainly concentrating on lexical semantics and ontology design. If you're currently working with an existing ontology, I'd love to talk to you!

I'm supervised a project developing a GUI to the TRIPS lexicon in Java. We created a flexible API for parsing and outputting the lexicon files, and a set of viewers that integrate information from different files in easy to view fashion, which I use actively to help me edit the lexicon. At present, we are developing the editor interface. You can look at the current documentation

Publications

  1. Myroslava O. Dzikovska "A Practical Semantic Representation for Natural Language Parsing", Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, January 2004.PDF
  2. M. O. Dzikovska, M. D. Swift, J. F. Allen, "Integrating linguistic and domain knowledge for spoken dialogue systems in multiple domains", in Proceedings of IJCAI-03 Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems, August 2003. PDF
  3. M. Dzikovska, M. Swift and J. Allen. "Customizing meaning: building domain-specific semantic representations from a generic lexicon." To appear in Computing Meaning, Vol.3., 2004 PDF
  4. M. O. Dzikovska, M. D. Swift, J. F. Allen, "Constructing custom semantic representations from a generic lexicon", in Proceedings of 5th International Workshop on Computational Semantics, 2003 PDF
  5. C. Sidner and M. Dzikovska, "Human - Robot Interaction: Engagement between Humans and Robots for Hosting Activities", in Proceedings of ICMI-2002, October 2002.
  6. Myroslava Dzikovska, James F. Allen, Mary D. Swift "Finding the balance between generic and domain-specific knowledge: a parser customization strategy", In Proceedings of LREC 2002 workshop on Customizing Knowledge for NLP applications, Las Palmas, 2002. PDF
  7. G.M. Ferguson, J.F. Allen, N.J. Blaylock, D.K. Byron, N.W. Chambers, M.O. Dzikovska, L. Galescu, X. Shen, R.S. Swier, and M.D. Swift, "The Medication Advisor Project: Preliminary Report", Technical Report 776, Computer Science Dept., University of Rochester, May 2002. PDF
  8. C. L. Sidner and M. O. Dzikovska. "Hosting Activities: Experience with and Future Directions for a Robot Agent Host", ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, January 2002.
  9. James Allen, Donna Byron, Myroslava Dzikovska, George Ferguson, Lucian Galescu, and Amanda Stent, "Towards conversational human-computer interaction," AI Magazine, 22(4), Winter 2001, pp. 27-37. (PDF)
  10. Myroslava Dzikovska, "A Practical Semantic Type Representation for Natural Language Understanding", Technical Report 733 and a thesis proposal, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, 2000. (postscript)
  11. Myroslava O. Dzikovska and Donna K. Byron, "When is a union really an intersection? Problems resolving reference to locations in a dialogue system", in Proceedings of the GOTALOG'2000, Gothenburg, June 2000. (postscript)
  12. J. Allen, D. Byron, M. Dzikovska, G. Ferguson, L. Galescu, and A. Stent. An Architecture for a Generic Dialogue Shell. Journal of Natural Language Engineering, special issue on Best Practices in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems Engineering, 6(3), December 2000, pp. 1-16 (pdf)
  13. M.Dzikovska, O.Kostiv "The use of object-oriented programming to represent tree structures", Ivan Franko Lviv University Reports, 1996.
  14. M.Dzikovska, I.Konstankevych, M.Batenchuk, L. Lymarenko "Computer modeling of light collection processes in scintillators of arbitrary shape" Proc. SPIE Vol. 2967, 1997
  15. M.Dzikovska, I.Konstankevych, M.Batenchuk, O.Kostiv "The use of object-oriented methods for calculating scintillator characteristics", USIM(Control systems and Computers), 1997, vol 6
  16. Konstankevych I., Zorenko Yu., Dzikovska M., Limarenko L. "Peculiarities of light transport processes in scintillator detectors with a large height to diameter ratio", Ukrainian Journal of Physics. To be published. 1999

Education/Research info

Education

September 1997- Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester. PhD in Computer Science (expected Fall 2003)

1992-1997 Ivan Franko Lviv State University, Applied Mathematics and Informatics department

June 1997 Diploma in applied mathematics

Research

Fall 1997- now TRAINS research group, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester
Robust understanding in spoken dialogue, lexicon and ontology development for TRIPS system. Domain adaptation in parsing. Statistical learning of semantic features for words.
Summer 2000 Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Boston, MA
Implementation of gestures synchronized with speech for a small robot attached to the COLLAGEN system.
1995-1997 Research laboratory of new optics materials, Institute of Applied Physics of Ivan Franko Lviv State University.
Calculation of the parameters of scintillators.
1994-1995 Chair of Programming, Ivan Franko Lviv State University, Lviv, Ukraine
Representations of trees and algorithms on them.

Miscellaneous

Diploma is considered equal to B.Sc., sometimes MS, because I spent 5 years studying and defended a thesis to graduate.

My diploma says "applied math", but this is only because of the foolish Ukrainian government classification system, which doesn't include Computer Science, my actual major.

My department gave me good background in both mathematics and computer science, though it was more oriented to computational math and numerical methods. Thus, most of my undergraduate research was done in scientific computation as the only research field supported by the department. My initial interest in NLP stems from the general interest in foreign languages and the ways their grammars work. In addition to Ukrainian, I freely speak Russian and English, and also know some Polish and French. I hope that one day we will build the systems that will be able to understand all these languages.

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