Micha Elsner

I'm focusing on the way discourse (especially the need for coherence) influences the syntactic realization of noun phrases. Major influences on my research include the coherence modeling work of Regina Barzilay, discourse-new NP modeling by Massimo Poesio and unsupervised coreference resolution of Haghighi and Klein.

I'm interested in unsupervised learning and principled approaches to semantic and pragmatic problems.

I graduated from the University of Rochester in 2005 with degrees in Computer Science and Classics. I got my MS from Brown in 2007.

Publications

• Micha Elsner and Warren Schudy. Bounding and Comparing Methods for Correlation Clustering Beyond ILP. NAACL-HLT 2009 Workshop on Integer Linear Programming for Natural Language Processing (ILP-NLP 2009), Boulder, Colorado. [PDF] [Slides (PDF)]
• Micha Elsner, Eugene Charniak, and Mark Johnson. Structured Generative Models for Unsupervised Named-Entity Clustering. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Language Technology and North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL 2009), Boulder, Colorado. [PDF] [Slides (PDF)]
• Eugene Charniak and Micha Elsner. EM Works for Pronoun Anaphora Resolution. Proceedings of the Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009), Athens, Greece. [PDF]
• Micha Elsner and Eugene Charniak. You Talking to Me? A Corpus and Algorithm for Conversation Disentanglement. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT 2008), Columbus, Ohio. [PDF] [Slides (PDF)]
• Micha Elsner and Eugene Charniak. Coreference-inspired Coherence Modeling. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT 2008), Columbus, Ohio. [PDF] [Poster (PDF)]
• Micha Elsner, Joseph Austerweil, and Eugene Charniak. A Unified Local and Global Model for Discourse Coherence. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Language Technology and North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL 2007), Rochester, New York. [PDF] [Slides (PDF)]
  Note: this publication contains a bug affecting development results. A short explanation has been attached to the beginning of the PDF.
• Eugene Charniak, Mark Johnson, Micha Elsner, Joseph Austerweil, David Ellis, Isaac Haxton, Catherine Hill, Shrivaths Iyengar, Jeremy Moore, Michael Pozar, and Theresa Vu. Multilevel Coarse-to-fine PCFG Parsing. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Language Technology and North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL 2006), Brooklyn, New York. [PDF] [Slides (PDF)]
• Micha Elsner, Mary Swift, James Allen and Daniel Gildea. Online Statistics for a Unification-Based Dialogue Parser. Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2005), Vancouver. [PDF] [Poster (PDF)]
• Thomas Kollar, Jonathan Schmid, Eric Meisner, Micha Elsner, Diana Calarese, Chikita Purav, Chris Brown, Jenine Turner, Dasun Peramunage, Gautam Altekar and Victoria Sweetser. Mabel: Extending Human Interaction and Robot Rescue Designs. AAAI Mobile Robot Competition 2003: Papers from the AAAI Workshop (ed. Smart, Smart, Bugajska), Acapulco. [PDF]

Tech Reports

• Micha Elsner and Eugene Charniak. A Generative Discourse-New Model for Text Coherence. Technical Report CS-07-04, Brown University. [PDF]

Talks

• Learning maximum-entropy models of salience via EM. Pattern theory reading group, Sept. 30, 2009, Brown Univ. [Slides (PDF)]
• Entity-based Coherence: Going Off the Grid. Invited talk, Mar. 4, 2009, Univ. of Pennsylvania. [Slides (PDF)]
• The Dangling Conversation: A Corpus and Algorithm for Conversation Disentanglement (extended version of ACL 2008 talk). Invited talk, Jan. 21, 2009, Univ. of Maryland. [Slides (PDF)]
• Given/New Information and the Discourse Coherence Problem. Invited talk, Oct. 10, 2007, MIT. [Slides (PDF)]

Software

• Waterworks: Python utility package, including ClusterMetrics library for evaluating clusterings. Mostly by David McClosky.
  [main site]
• Correlation Clustering System: framework for creating and analyzing datasets (Python), heuristic solvers, LP, ILP and SDP bounding systems (C++).
  This is the release version; the evaluation code requires Waterworks.
  README, [tgz]
  You may also want the data matrices we constructed for 20 newsgroups: [tgz]
• Unsupervised Pronoun Anaphora System: EM learner, pre-trained model (newswire) and pronoun resolver (C++).
  Eugene wrote this software, so although I'm pleased to answer questions on it, I don't know the gory innards in detail.
  [tgz]
• IRC Chat Data and Disentanglement Model: annotated IRC chat data, annotation software (Java), analysis and disentanglement model (Python).
  README, [tgz]
• Brown Coherence Toolkit: software for a variety of local coherence models and test applications (C++).
  Now updated! (v0.2)
  README, [tgz]

Teaching

• Guest lecture, Human and Machine Learning: Machine learning doesn't work: the no-free-lunch theorem, the curse of dimensionality, bias and variance of estimators.
• TA for CS 1460: Introduction to Computational Linguistics:
  prepared assignment 1 (language modeling), helped write midterm/final questions
  guest lectures: Expectation/Maximization for IBM model 1, EM using the Inside/Outside algorithm for PCFGS, Improving PCFGs with tree annotation and state-splitting
  grading, office hours and support
• Sheridan Center teaching certificate 1

People I've Worked With

• When I started out at Rochester, I worked as an annotator for Joel Tetreault.
• My undergraduate research was supervised by James Allen and Mary Swift.
• Joe Austerweil worked with me when he was an undergrad at Brown. He's now at Berkeley working for Tom Griffiths.
• In spring 2008, I studied at Universität des Saarlandes under the PIRE grant. I did some work (which I'm currently not pursuing) with Caroline Sporleder on event detection in the GENIA corpus.
• I've done some work on correlation clustering with my housemate Warren Schudy.

Service

• Faculty-Graduate Liason (FGL), Brown CS, 2008-9.
• Brown/MIT/Harvard NLP 2009 Summit co-organizer
• NAACL 2009 reviewer
• ACL 2008-9 reviewer
• COLING 2008 reviewer
• NESCAI 2007-8 reviewer
• ICML 2007 co-reviewer
• 2006-7: Leader of Machine Learning Reading Group

melsner@cs.brown.edu

Box 1910, Computer Science Department

Brown University

Providence, RI 02912

401-863-7600 (voice)

401-863-7657 (fax)

melsner0 (skype)