Eric K. Ringger

ERIC K. RINGGER

Computer Science Department
Brigham Young University
3368 TMCB

Provo, Utah 84602

USA

         

 

Eric Ringger is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and Co-Director of the Natural Language Processing Lab.

Research Goals and Interests

Statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP) is my research area.  I build automatic systems for analyzing and producing natural language texts using insights from linguistics, statistics, and machine-learning. Current projects include spoken language identification, document clustering, keyword extraction from documents, and automatic paraphrase.  Recent projects have included email message and sentence classification, dependency parsing, and generation for machine translation.

I am especially interested in the problem of feature engineering for machine learning in NLP.  I organized the ACL 2005 Workshop on Feature Engineering for Machine Learning in Natural Language Processing held in June in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Proceedings are available here from the ACL Anthology.

My other interests include computational linguistics, human speech and language, statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, machine translation, and speech processing.

Courses

Fall 2006:
Winter 2006:
Fall 2005:

Experience

From 1997-2005, I was a member of the Natural Language Processing group of Microsoft Research. I designed and built the Amalgam system with colleagues in the NLP group. Amalgam is a machine-learned approach to sentence generation, applied to German, French, and English for machine translation. See the results at the Microsoft support site (here's an example: in German; in French). I worked on the Concerto spoken dialog system, a prototype conversational system that was easy to customize and extend to new domains of discourse. I built the TaskFlags email classification system, an add-in for Outlook capable of spotting tasks, promises, and other useful elements of email messages by classifying individual sentences.  Colleagues and I also worked on dependency parsing.

My dissertation is titled Correcting Speech Recognition Errors. It also examines possible interfaces between Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding. My advisor was Prof. James Allen.

I worked with James Allen, George Ferguson, Brad Miller, and others on the TRAINS and TRIPS projects. I contributed to the construction of several conversational planning systems: TRAINS-95, TRAINS-96, and TRIPS-97. I have also worked on automatic speech and language understanding. My efforts have focused on improving the interface between speech recognition and natural language parsing and on incorporating linguistic information in statistical language models for speech recognition.

For fun, check out my “academic lineage”.

Publications

Parsing and Parser Evaluation:
Email Classification:
Customer Feedback Mining
Sentence Realization:
Machine Translation:
Semantic Representation:
Language Modeling:
Dialog:
Error Correction and Robustness:

Invited Talks

Professional Associations

          ACL

          AAAI

         IEEE and its Signal Processing Society

Personal

My little blog:  http://eringger.blogspot.com/

NLP Lab  ||  Computer Science Department  ||  Brigham Young University

Last updated: 2006 April 12