Micha Elsner

I'm still studying document coherence, following the approach of Regina Barzilay. I've done some work on the way discourse influences the syntax of noun phrases, related to that of Massimo Poesio. Currently, I'm trying to combine some of this with coreference resolution following Haghighi and Klein.

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

Currently, I am the Faculty-Graduate Liason (FGL). If you have questions, complaints or suggestions about graduate life in the CS department, please write me email (or anonymous email).

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 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

• Given/New Information and the Discourse Coherence Problem. Invited talk, Oct. 10 2007, MIT. [Slides (PDF)]

Software

• 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]

People I've Worked With

• Former collaborator Joe Austerweil went to Berkeley to work for Tom Griffiths.
• In spring 2008, I studied at Universität des Saarlandes under the PIRE grant. I did some work (currently ongoing) with Caroline Sporleder on event detection in the GENIA corpus.

Other

• ACL 2008 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)