The NLP Group at Penn State

Maryam successfully defended her thesis defense on 14th June 2021. The online copy of the thesis can be found online using the link: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/22618muz50  Title:  AN AGENT LEARNING DIALOGUE POLICIES FOR SENSING PERCEIVING AND LEARNING THROUGH MULTI-MODAL COMMUNICATION Abstract: Language communication is an important part of human life and a natural and intuitive way of learning new things. It is easy to imagine intelligent agents that can learn through communication to for example, help us in rescue scenarios, surgery, or even agriculture. As natural as learning through language is to humans, developing such agents has numerous challenges: Language is ambiguous, and humans convey their intentions in different ways using different words. Tasks have different learning goals and some are more complex than others. Additionally, humans differ in their communicative skills, particularly, in how much information they share or know. Thus, th...

Title: Analysis of Text To Identify, Represent, And Group Distinct Propositions   Atomic propositions are the semantic building blocks of discursive text, and are organized into simple or complex sentences in diverse syntactic structures. They are critical for many NLP applications. In this thesis, we study the identification, representation and grouping of propositions for text analysis. At the beginning of the thesis, we will introduce NLP resources for identifying and representing propositions, which include a newly annotated corpus and two modified corpus from publicly released datasets. We will also present educational data collection and annotation for the purpose of developing educational technologies to analyze and assess student writing. Later we will present the NLP contributions of this thesis, which include EDUA, an algorithm to group propositions from different texts that mean essentially the same thing; ABCD, a neural model to learn edit operations to identify and ext...