Benjamin Van Durme

PhD Candidate
Department of Computer Science
Department of Linguistics
University of Rochester
email:

(2006) MS Computer Science, U. of Rochester
(2004) MS Language Technologies, Carnegie Mellon University
(2001) BS Computer Science/BA Cognitive Science, U. of Rochester

I am interested in things like natural language processing (specifically computational semantics), knowledge representation, belief revision, and computational theories of ethics.

While a grad student at CMU (under the direction of Eric Nyberg and Bob Frederking), I was involved with the department's efforts in the AQUAINT project on Question Answering, as well as Project HALO, aimed at building a system that could answer AP science exam questions.

I came to Rochester in order to pursue a thesis focused on commonsense knowledge extraction.

I spent the summers of '06 and '07 doing research at Google with Marius Pasca. This work focusses on finding characteristic attributes (e.g. "mayor") for concept classes (e.g. "city"), as well as collecting such classes automatically.

On September 28th, 2007, I defended a thesis proposal. My committee consists of Len Schubert and Dan Gildea of Computer Science, Greg Carlson of Linguistics, and William Cohen of the Machine Learning Department at CMU.

Lately I'm sometimes found lurking in the basement of the building which houses Brain and Cognitive Science, with a group led by Florian Jaeger, looking for ways to further mingle topics from computer science and (human) language processing. I am part of a subgroup concerned specifically with corpus statistics, fellow members being Austin Frank and Celeste Kidd of BCS, and Matthew Post of CS.


user: va nd ur me domain: cs.rochester.edu

References

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Lenhart Schubert and Benjamin Van Durme. Open Extraction of General Knowledge through Compositional Semantics. NSF Symposium on Semantic Knowledge Discovery, Organization and Use. New York, New York. November 14-17, 2008.

Benjamin Van Durme and Lenhart K. Schubert. Open Knowledge Extraction through Compositional Language Processing. Symposium on Semantics in Systems for Text Processing (STEP'08). Venice, Italy. September 22-24, 2008.

Benjamin Van Durme, Ting Qian and Lenhart K. Schubert. Class-Driven Attribute Extraction. COLING'08. Manchester, UK. August 18-22, 2008.

Austin F. Frank, Celeste Kidd, Matthew Post, Benjamin Van Durme and T. Florian Jaeger. The Web as a Psycholinguistic Resource. Poster presented at the 5th International Workshop on Language Production. Annapolis, MD. July 28-30, 2008.

Benjamin Van Durme and Marius Pasca. Finding Cars, Goddesses and Enzymes: Parametrizable Acquisition of Labeled Instances for Open-Domain Information Extraction. Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Chicago, Illinois, USA. July 13-17, 2008.

Dekang Lin, Shaojun Zhao, Benjamin Van Durme and Marius Pasca. Mining Parenthetical Translations from the Web by Word Alignment. The 46th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-08: HLT). Columbus, Ohio, USA. June 15-20, 2008.

Marius Pasca and Benjamin Van Durme. Weakly-Supervised Acquisition of Open-Domain Classes and Class Attributes from Web Documents and Query Logs. The 46th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-08: HLT). Columbus, Ohio, USA. June 15-20, 2008.

Marius Pasca, Benjamin Van Durme, Nikesh Garera. The Role of Documents vs. Queries in Extracting Class Attributes from Text . ACM Sixteenth Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2007). Lisboa, Portugal. November 6-9, 2007.

Marius Pasca and Benjamin Van Durme. What You Seek is What You Get: Extraction of Class Attributes from Query Logs. Hyderabad, India, February 2007. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07).

Anna Kupsc, Teruko Mitamura, Benjamin Van Durme, Eric Nyberg. Pronominal Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Text. Lisbon, Portugal, May 24-30 2004. LREC.

Benjamin Van Durme, Yifen Huang, Anna Kupsc, Eric Nyberg. Towards Light Semantic Processing for Question Answering. Edmonton, Canada, May 31 2003. HLT/NAACL Workshop on Text Meaning.

E. Nyberg, T. Mitamura, J. Callan, J. Carbonell, R. Frederking, K. Collins-Thompson, L. Hiyakumoto, Y. Huang, C. Huttenhower, S. Judy, J. Ko, A. Kupsc, L. Lita, V. Pedro, D. Svoboda and B. Van Durme. The JAVELIN Question-Answering System at TREC 2003: A Multi-Strategy Approach with Dynamic Planning. 12th Text REtrieval Conference, November 2003.