Linguistically-Motivated Subjectivity and Sentiment Annotation and Tagging of Modern Standard Arabic

Abdul-Mageed, M & Diab, M. (Forthcoming, 2012). Linguistically-Motivated Subjectivity and Sentiment Annotation and Tagging of Modern Standard Arabic. (Journal Publication!)

Statistical Parsing, Computational Pragmatics, Computational Lexical Semantics, and Semitic Morphology & Syntax

*[photo credit: http://verbs.colorado.edu/LSA2011/manyfaces/nlp.html]

During part of the 2011 Summer, I attended the Linguistic Society of America's (LSA 2011) Summer Institute. It was held in Colorado University at Boulder. I took four courses, as follows:

1. Statistical Parsing: (with Rebecca Hwa, Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh). We covered various parsing algorithms. We also built a parser for a dummy language using some code provided by Rebecca. After we wrote a grammar for the language, I developed a simple algorithm that optimized the performance of the parser and could improve about 2% over the performance of the non-optimized parser. Rebecca, Sandra (Kuebler, my wonderful IU advisor) and I had great time dining in Boulder and eating ice cream. Oh, we also had an eventful trip to the Rocky Mountains!
2. Computational Pragmatics: (with Chris Potts, from the Department of Linguistics, Stanford University). We looked into various ways of computing pragmatic phenomena using corpora. Chris had lots of data and the class was pretty interactive. We turned quick proof-of-concept exercises (and of course I did it all in Python ;)). I turned a proof-of-concept system for gender detection as a final project. Hopefully I will have time to improve and publish!
3. Computational Lexical Semantics: (with Martha Palmer, Colorado linguistics & Christian Fellbaum, from Princeton Computer Science Dept.). We covered a lot of computational semantics, including (multi-lingual) semantic role labeling. Martha and Christian introduced several resources and we turned exercises where we used such resources in meaningful ways. I turned a Web-mining project that I am excited about!! Christiane was generous with her time and we met once for coffee (my treat :), I could convince Christiane) and another time for lunch.
4. Semitic Morphology & Syntax: (with Abbas Benmamoun from Univ. of Illinois Linguistics and Adam Ussishkin, from Univ. of Arizona Linguistics) We covered what the course title suggests and I reviewed two articles about the automatic processing of Hebrew and Egyptian Arabic as a final project.