About Me

I completed my PhD under Professor James F. Allen in the Computer Science department at the University of Rochester (URCS). Recently, I joined the R&D of Nuance Communications as a NLP Research Engineer.

My work primarily falls under natural language processing/understanding (NLP/NLU). I worked with Professor James F. Allen at URCS on problems related to temporal information processing (extraction, question answering, evaluation, etc.). I also collaborated with Professor Jeffrey P. Bigham on making information accessible. I had done multiple research internships in various domains, such as, game prediction using social media (Yahoo! Research), medical NLP (Microsoft M3L), and car dialog systems (Bosch RTC). Currently at Nuance Communications, I am working in the NLU Core Architecture group of Mobility Division.

I have way too many profiles scattered on the internet. Check out my website naushad.uzzaman.com to find about all of my activities in one place.

May 10 in NJ

Area of Interest

Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing/Understanding, Computational Linguistics, Text Analysis, Temporal Information Processing, Information Extraction, Dialog Assistant, Question Answering, Social Media Text Analysis, Medical NLP, Multimodal Summarization, Data Mining, Human Computer Interaction.

CV

If you are interested, here is my
CV [short] [detailed],
Research Statement, and
full LinkedIn profile (with recommendations at the end) [LinkedIn].

Naushad UzZaman's Google Citation Naushad UzZaman's bibliography View Naushad UzZaman's profile on LinkedIn

Latest News

  • November 30, 2012. Published TwitterPaul paper in arXiv. Find out about it here.
  • November 19, 2012. Started a new blog - DecipherData. I am thinking of using my after-office hours for deciphering the public data. So I plan to use this blog to document my journey and also to hopefully report some interesting findings eventually.
  • July 30, 2012. Started at Nuance Communications as a NLP Research Engineer.
  • July 20, 2012. Successfully defended my PhD! Now I am Dr. UzZaman :-)
  • July 9, 2012. Our work on evaluation of temporal information understanding using temporal question-answering got accepted at ICSC 2012.
  • May 23, 2012. Our work on merging temporal annotations got accepted at TIME 2012.
  • March 14, 2012. Another reason for me to celebrate the Pi day (3/14). Accepted a job offer from Nuance Communications. I will be joining Nuance in August 2012.
  • December 8, 2011. Officially looking for job now. If you are interested, here is my Research Statement and CV.
  • December 7, 2011. Had a productive semester working with Hector Llorens. We prepared for organizing TempEval-3, and also worked on merging temporal annotations and temporal question answering.
  • September 1, 2011. Back to school! Enjoyed working at Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, my project on game prediction using social media and the city Barcelona.
  • May 25, 2011. Started internship at the Semantic Search group, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona for the summer.
  • May 13, 2011. Won the 3rd prize at UR's Center for Research Computing poster session for Multimodal Summarization for people with cognitive disabilities in reading, linguistic and verbal comprehension. [poster]
  • May 12, 2011. Created profile at Mendeley. Also created Temporal Information Processing group. Join us if you work on related areas.
  • April 26, 2011. With James Allen, Hector Llorens, James Pustejovsky and Marc Verhagen, will be organizing TempEval-3.
  • February 16, 2011. In an article about IBM's work on enabling the WWW with speech, our work on automatically illustrating complex sentences as multimodal summaries combining picture, simple sentence structure and summarized text is described with a few words, our [paper] [presentation].
  • [more news] [photography news]

Recent Publications

  • Naushad UzZaman, Roi Blanco and Michael Matthews. 2012. TwitterPaul: Extracting and Aggregating Twitter Predictions. arXiv:1211.6496.

  • Naushad UzZaman, Hector Llorens and James Allen. Evaluating Temporal Information Understanding with Temporal Question Answering. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, Italy, September 2012. [paper]

  • Hector Llorens, Naushad UzZaman and James F. Allen. Merging Temporal Annotations. Proceedings of 19th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning, Leicester, UK, September 2012. [paper]

  • Naushad UzZaman, Hector Llorens, James F. Allen, Leon Derczynski, Marc Verhagen, James Pustejovsky. 2012. TempEval-3: Evaluating Events, Time Expressions, and Temporal Relations. arXiv:1206.5333v1.

  • Naushad UzZaman and James F. Allen. Temporal Evaluation. Proc. of The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Short Paper), Portland, Oregon, USA, June 2011. [paper] [poster] [toolkit]

  • Naushad UzZaman and James F. Allen. Event and Temporal Expression extraction from raw text: first step towards a temporally aware system. International Journal of Semantic Computing, 2011. [paper]

  • Naushad UzZaman, Jeffrey P. Bigham and James F. Allen. Multimodal Summarization of Complex Sentence. Proc. of International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Palo Alto, California, 2011. [paper] [presentation]

  • Naushad UzZaman, Jeffrey P. Bigham and James F. Allen. Multimodal Summarization for people with cognitive disabilities in reading, linguistic and verbal comprehension. 2010 Coleman Institute Conference, Denver, CO, 2010. [abstract] [poster]

  • Naushad UzZaman and James F. Allen. Extracting Events and Temporal Expressions from Text. Fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (IEEE ICSC2010), Pittsburgh, USA, September 2010. [paper] [presentation]

  • Naushad UzZaman and James F. Allen. TRIPS and TRIOS System for TempEval-2: Extracting Temporal Information from Text. International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2010), Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Sweden, July 2010. [paper] [presentation]

  • Naushad UzZaman and James F. Allen. TRIOS-TimeBank Corpus: Extended TimeBank corpus with help of Deep Understanding of Text. Proceedings of The seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Malta, May 2010. [paper] [presentation]

  • Naushad UzZaman, Jeffrey P. Bigham and James F. Allen. Pictorial Temporal Structure of Documents to Help People who have Trouble Reading or Understanding. International Workshop on Design to Read, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Atlanta, GA, April 2010. [paper] [presentation]

  • Recent papers with previews and additional comments can be found in my publication page and Bangla language processing related papers can be found in my previous webpage. Citation records are available in Google Scholar page.

Research Projects

PhD program

  • Temporal Information Extraction: We implemented hybrid systems with linguistically motivated solutions and machine learning classifiers for extracting temporal information from raw text. We do deep semantic parsing and use hand-coded rules to extract events, features and temporal expressions from the logical forms produced by the parser. In parallel, we filter events, extract event features, temporal expressions, classify temporal relations using machine-learning classifiers. Our system had a competitive performance in all tasks of TempEval-2.

  • Temporal Evaluation: We proposed a new metric for evaluation of temporal annotation. It uses temporal closure to reward relations that are equivalent but distinct. Our metric measures the overall performance of systems with a single score, making comparison between different systems straightforward. Our approach is intuitive and computationally inexpensive. This evaluation metric will be used in TempEval-3 to evaluate participants.

  • Temporal Question Answering: We proposed a temporal QA system that performed temporal reasoning and showed how it can be used to evaluate automated temporal information understanding. With temporal reasoning, our QA system can answer list, factoid and yes/no questions. This was a joint work with Hector Llorens.

  • Creating 1 million word corpus with temporal annotation and organizing TempEval-3: We teamed up with other participants of TempEval-2, Hector Llorensand Leon Derczynski, and the organizers of TempEval-2, Marc Verhagen and James Pustejovsky, to create a 1 million word corpus with temporal annotation and to organize TempEval-3. We will automatically annotate a 1-million word corpus from news domain by merging our system outputs and human-reviewing a portion of it. We will organize TempEval-3 with that corpus.

  • Merging Temporal Annotations: We proposed algorithms for merging multiple temporal annotations. With such a merging algorithm, we can merge multiple systems, multiple human annotations, or a combination of both. We evaluated our algorithm over TimeBank and AQUAINT corpora considering three state-of-the-art systems. The results of merging improve over individual systems and baseline merging algorithms. We will be using this merging tool to merge automated system outputs for TempEval-3 to create the 1-million word corpus. This is a joint work with Hector Llorens.

  • Multimodal Summarization: In collaboration with Jeffrey P. Bigham and James Allen, I worked on illustrating complex sentences as multimodal summaries combining pictures, simple sentence structure and summarized text. We show that pictures alone are insufficient to help people understand most sentences, especially for readers who are unfamiliar with the domain. An evaluation of our system in the Wikipedia domain illustrates both the promise and challenge of automatically creating multimodal summaries. MMS could be used to help people with cognitive disabilities, children, older people, or people whose first language is not English.

Research Internship

  • Game Prediction with Social Media at Yahoo! Research, Barcelona (2011): We explored the use of social media for game prediction by prototyping our system on World Cup Soccer 2010 tournament with Twitter data. We extracted around 150K prediction tweets from 1.8 billion tweets by matching the syntactic structure of predictions, instead of just matching prediction words. We created a prediction retrieval exploratory search application with the high-precision extracted predictions, where all predictions for a game are shown and the predictors are ranked according to their previous prediction success. Finally, we aggregated the predictions and we predicted the most likely outcome of upcoming games with high success. A key benefit of our framework is that it does not rely on the domain dependent knowledge for prediction, rather uses crowd's predictions from the social media. As a result, we can consider crowd's analysis about the event and by aggregating the predictions, we can attempt to predict the outcome of other sport events, elections, product release dates and any other future events discussed in the social media. Find more here: TwitterPaul.

  • Information Extraction on Demand at Microsoft Medical Media Lab (2009): Implemented an Information Extraction tool that can learn different patterns from user's examples and extract the pattern instances from natural language texts in medical domain, e.g. release notes, radiology reports, etc. For pattern matching, we used the medical ontology (UMLS) to understand medical patterns like diseases, medicines, etc. and considered language features for general patterns like patient names, IDs, dates, etc. My implemented tool was shared with the clinical staff at Washington Hospital Center and they found it useful.

  • In-Car Dialog System at Bosch RTC (2008): Developed a syntactic and semantic grammar for a commercial in-car dialog system. It was very similar to the famous Siri, iPhone's dialog assistant. My work was in navigation, local business and MP3 domain.

Contact Information

Naushad UzZaman, PhD
Computer Science Department [Why URCS?]
University of Rochester
Email:

Web: http://www.naushad.uzzaman.com
Research Profile: www.cs.rochester.edu/~naushad
Photo blog: http://www.naushadzaman.com

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