rada mihalcea   
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research
interests . projects . activities . invited talks . tutorials . conferences . workshops . resources



awards
  • Honorary Citizen of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2013.
  • Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), 2009. Awarded by President Barack Obama.
  • UNT Early Career Award for Research and Creativity, 2009.
  • National Science Foundation CAREER award, 2008.
  • Best paper award, second place, International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, 2007.
  • Best paper award, International Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society, 1999, 2000.
  • National Mathematics Olympiads, Romania, 1986, 1987, 1990.


    research group
    My research group is the Language and Information Technologies group (LIT@UMich). Our work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, Google, IBM, Samsung, DARPA, NGO, and the states of Texas and Michigan.


    research interests
    My research interests are in Natural Language Processing, Multimodal Processing, Computational Social Sciences. Research topics that I worked on over the years include:
  • Computational sociolinguistics (cross-cultural value learning, text-based geolocation, language-based modeling of worldview, multimodal personality detection, deception detection)
  • Multimodal sensing and tracking of human behavior (deception, affect, stress, alertness)
  • Joint modeling of language and vision (text-video question answering, text-image similarity, image annotatin)
  • Lexical semantics (semantic similarity, word sense disambiguation, lexical substitution)
  • Graph-based algorithms for natural language processing (text summarization, word sense disambiguation, keyphrase extraction, category assignment)
  • Multilingual natural language processing
  • Multilingual subjectivity, sentiment, and emotion analysis
  • Computational humor


    current research projects
    Computational Sociolinguistics methods to identify people's values, behaviors, personality, worldviews from their language
    Multimodal Deception Detection multimodal deception detection using physiological and linguistic signals
    Sentiment and Subjectivity Analysis multilingual sentiment and subjectivity analysis, emotion analysis
    Conversational Technologies natural language understanding and dialog systems for student advising
    Natural Language Processing for Motivational Interviewing language analysis of counseling behavior during MI encounters
    Joint Language-Vision Models joint models of language and vision applied to image tagging, text-image similarity, movie question answering
    Computational Humor computational approaches for humour recognition and generation


    previous research projects
    Automatic Semantic Interpretation semantic interpretation with monolingual and cross-lingual evidence
    MuSeNet multilingual semantic networks for text processing applications
    TextRank graph-based ranking algorithms for text processing
    Babylon methods for building and exploiting parallel texts
    Resources for word / sentence alignment
    SenseLearner tools for finding the meaning of all words in unrestricted text
    Text-to-image Synthesis language processing models for text-to-image synthesis and automatic image annotation
    Teach-Computers data collection with volunteer contributions over the Web
    SPOT semantic parsing for open text


    current activities
  • Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, associate editor (2016-2019).
  • Computer Speech and Language, associate editor (2016-2018).


    past activities
  • Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics, associate editor (2012-2015).
  • IEEE Transactions of Affective Computing, associate editor (2012-2014).
  • Journal of Natural Language Engineering (2007-2012)
  • John Benjamins series on Natural Language Processing, advisory board
  • SIGLEX president (2004-2007)
  • Computational Linguistics editorial board (2005-2007)
  • Language Resources and Evaluation editorial board (2005-2006)
  • Research on Language and Computation (2007-2011)
  • Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning editorial board (2006-present)
  • SIGNLL board member (2002-2010)
  • Senseval/Semeval advising committee (2004-2010)
  • Guest editor for JNLE Special Issue on Parallel Texts, 2005 (with Michel Simard)


    conferences
  • North American Association for Computational Lingustics, general chair, Denver, Colorado, 2015.
  • Association for Computational Linguistics, co-chair, Portland Oregon 2011.
  • Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, co-chair, Singapore, 2009.


    invited talks
  • Keynote talk, Deception Detection using Real-life Trial Data, NAACL Workshop on Computational Approaches to Deception Detection, San Diego, June 18, 2016.
  • Keynote talk, Deception Detection using Real-life Trial Data, International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2016), Corfu Island, Greece, July 1, 2016.
  • Oakland University, Deception Detection using Real-life Trial Data, ACM Women and Diversity in Technology Lecture Series, Rochester, MI, March 30, 2016.
  • Oxford University, What Men Say, What Women Hear: Using Semantics To Make Better Sense of Gender Differences in Social Media, Oxford, UK, October 13, 2015.
  • Keynote talk, What Men Say, What Women Hear: Using Semantics To Make Better Sense of Gender Differences in Social Media, LSDSem 2015/LSD-Sem: EMNLP Workshop on Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics, Lisbon, Portugal, September 18, 2015.
  • University of Michigan, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, NCIBI Tools and Technology, Ann Arbor, MI, May 14, 2015.
  • Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, What Women Want: Tracking and Understanding Gender Differences using Large-Scale Text Mining, Occala, FL, April 2, 2015.
  • Invited talk, The Joy of Computing, Girls in Research Engineering and Technology (GREAT) Day, presentation made to the parents of approximately 240 middle/high-school girls and parents, U. Michigan, April 12, 2014.
  • Keynote talk, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, German Society of Computational Linguistics (GSCL), Darmstadt, Germany, September 27, 2013.
  • Keynote talk, Multilingual Natural Language Processing, Cross-Lingual Evaluation Framework (CLEF), Valencia, Spain, September 25, 2013.
  • Keynote talk, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, ICDM 2012: SENTIRE Workshop on Sentiment Elicitation from Natural Text for Information Retrieval and Extraction, Bruxelles, Belgium, December 10, 2012.
  • Texas A&M College Station, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, College Station, TX, November 5, 2012.
  • Invited presentation, Emotion Annotation and Recognition in Text, NSF workshop on Opinion Summarization, University of Pennsylvania, October 20, 2012.
  • University of Texas at Dallas, Using Wikipedia for Natural Language Processing, Dallas, TX, October 1, 2012.
  • Keynote talk, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, ACL 2012: 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis, July 12, 2012, Jeju Island, Korea.
  • Samsung R&D Dallas, Random Walks on Text Structures, Dallas, TX, July 30, 2012.
  • Keynote talk, Large scale graph algorithms for topic identification in Wikipedia, ACL 2012: TextGraphs-7: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing, July 13, 2012, Jeju Island, Korea.
  • Keynote talk, Multilingual Natural Language Processing, EACL 2012: Workshop on Innovative hybrid approaches to the processing of textual data, April 23, 2012.
  • Southern Methodist University, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, Dallas, April 12, 2012.
  • University of Alabama at Birmingham, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, Birmingham, April 6, 2012.
  • Keynote talk, Mexican Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI 2011), Natural Language Processing using Wikipedia, Puebla, Mexico, November 30, 2011.
  • Keynote talk, MICAI-HLT 2011: 7th MICAI Workshop on Human Language Technologies, Multilingual Natural Language Processing: Are More Languages Better?, Puebla, Mexico, November 29, 2011.
  • University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Multilingual Subjectivity Analysis, Urbana, October 28, 2011.
  • Rutgers University, Using Wikipedia for Natural Language Processing, Brunswick, New Jersey, September 2011.
  • Northwestern University, The Language of Humor, Chicago, IL, May 13, 2011.
  • Johns Hopkins University, Center for Speech and Language Processing Multilingual Subjectivity Analysis, Baltimore, MD, May 2, 2011.
  • Temple University, Multilingual Subjectivity Analysis, Philadelphia, PA, April 15, 2011.
  • University of Texas Health Science, Using Wikipedia for Natural Language Processing, Houston, February 16, 2011.
  • Texas A&M Commerce, Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge, Commerce, October 18, 2010.
  • Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge , Texas A&M, College Station, November 16, 2009.
  • The Language of Humor , Southern Methodist University, Dallas, October 8, 2009.
  • The Language of Humor , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Arts and Sciences, Boston, October 2, 2009.
  • Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge, keynote at the ACL workshop The People's Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources , Singapore, August 2009.
  • Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge, Computational Linguistics group, University of Texas at Austin, March 9, 2009.
  • Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge, Education Testing Services, Princeton, NJ, September 5, 2008.
  • Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge: Using Wikipedia as a Source of Linguistic Evidence, Dublin City University, February 8, 2008.
  • keynote at the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence, Tubingen, Germany, February 1, 2008.
  • Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge: Using Wikipedia as a Source of Linguistic Evidence, University of Toronto, January 30, 2008.
  • Learning Multilingual Subjective Language via Cross-Lingual Projections, Columbia University, New York, September 2007.
  • The Language of Humour, keynote at the Workshop on Cross-lingual Information Processing, Camogli, Italy, July 2007.
  • Using Wikipedia for Word Sense Disambiguation, keynote at the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering Principles and Techniques, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, June 2007.
  • Measures of Text Semantic Similarity, Sussex University, Brighton, United Kingdom, May 17, 2007.
  • A Picture is Worth Seven Thousand Words: Toward Communicating Simple Sentences using Pictorial Representations, Turing Center, Washington University, Seattle, Washington, April 17, 2007.
  • A Picture is Worth Seven Thousand Words: Toward Communicating Simple Sentences using Pictorial Representations, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City, March 20, 2007.
  • The Language of Humour, keynote at the NAACL workshop on Computational Approaches to Figurative Language, Rochester, NY, April 26, 2007.
  • Building Multilingual and Crosslingual Semantic Resources with Volunteer Contributions over the Web, invited presentation at the workshop on ``Multi-lingual semantic annotation: Theory and applications'', Saarland University, Saarbrucken, Germany, June 23, 2006.
  • Measures of Text Semantic Similarity, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, June 16, 2006.
  • Measures of Text Semantic Similarity, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK, June 2006.
  • Random Walks on Text Structures, keynote at the International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, CICLing, Mexico City, Mexico, February 2006.
  • Text Processing with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica Optica y Electronica (INAOE), Puebla, Mexico, September 6, 2005.
  • Text Processing with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, University of Ottawa, TAMALE Research Day, Ottawa, Canada, May 25, 2005.
  • Graph-based Algorithms for Text Processing, University of Memphis, Memphis, March 17, 2005.
  • Random Walks on Text Structures, University of Texas, Forum for Artificial Intelligence, Austin, February 24, 2005.
  • Using Your Algorithm to Solve My Problems, Google, Sunnyvale, December 16, 2004.
  • Making Sense Out of the Web, keynote at Lexical Resources and the Web for Word Sense Disambiguation, IBERAMIA, Puebla, Mexico, November 22, 2004.
  • Text Processing with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, School of Libraries and Information Sciences, UNT, November 3, 2004.
  • Graph-Theory Meets Computational Linguistics: Text Processing with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, keynote at EsTAL 2004, Alicante, Spain, October 21, 2004.
  • Text Summarization with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, Microsoft Research, Seattle, September 10, 2004.
  • Text Summarization with Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, Xerox Research Center Europe, Grenoble, France, August 20, 2004.
  • Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation using Graph-based Ranking Algorithms, Istituto Trentino di Coltura ITC/IRST, Trento, Italy, August 4, 2004.
  • Graph-based Ranking Algorithms for Language Processing, USC/ISI, April 16, 2004 [abstract]
  • The Quest for Meaning, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science, August 23, 2003.
  • The Web as Collective Mind: Building Large Annotated Corpora with Web Users' Help, invited presentation at the 1st Meaning Workshop, San Sebastian, Basque Country, April 11-12, 2003.
  • Using the Web for Word Sense Disambiguation, University of Minnesota, Duluth, October 24, 2002 [abstract]
  • Efficient Data Driven Methods for Word Sense Disambiguation, University of Ottawa, March 11, 2002 [abstract]


    tutorials
  • Multilingual Sentiment and Subjectivity Analysis, tutorial at the Mexican Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI 2011), November 2011, Association for Computational Lingustics (ACL 2012) (with Jan Wiebe, Carmen Banea)
  • Words, meanings, and Emotions, tutorial at the Eurolan Summer School, Iasi, Romania, August 2007 (with Carlo Strapparava).
  • Graph-based Algorithms for Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing, tutorial at RANLP 2005 Borovetz Bulgaria September 2005, HLT-NAACL 2006 New York City June 2006 (with Drago Radev).
  • How to add a new language on the NLP map, tutorial at EUROLAN 2005, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, August 2005 (with Vivi Nastase, Doina Tatar), IJCNLP 2008, Hyderabad, India, 2008.
  • Advances in Word Sense Disambiguation (with Ted Pedersen), tutorial at IBERAMIA 2004 Puebla Mexico November 2004, ACL 2005 Ann Arbor June 2005, AAAI 2005 Pittsburgh July 2005.


    workshops
  • Workshop on Multimodal Deception Detection, ICMI 2015 (with Mohamed Abouelenien, Mihai Burzo, Veronica Perez-Rosas)
  • NAACL 2012 wokshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, Montreal, June 2012. (with David Elson, Anna Kazantseva, Stan Szpakowicz)
  • IJCAI 2009 workshop on User-contributed knowledge and artificial intelligence, an evolving synergy, Pasadena, July 2009. (with Razvan Bunescu, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Vivi Nastase)
  • AAAI 2008 Workshop on Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy (WIKIAI-08), Chicago, July 2008. (with Razvan Bunescu, Evgeniy Gabrilovich)
  • NAACL 2007 workshop on Textgraphs: Graph-based Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, Rochester, April 2007. (with Chris Biemann, Irina Matveeva, Drago Radev)
  • NAACL 2006 workshop on Textgraphs: Graph-based Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, New York City, June 2006. (with Drago Radev)
  • ACL 2005 workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data Driven Machine Translation and Beyond, Ann Arbor, July 2005. (with Philipp Koehn, Joel Martin, Christof Monz, Ted Pedersen)
  • AAAI 2005 Spring Symposium on Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors, March 2005. (with Timothy Chklovski, Pedro Domingos, Henry Lieberman, Push Singh)
  • Senseval-3, "3rd International Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for the Semantic Analysis of Text", ACL, Barcelona, July 2004. (with Phil Edmonds)
  • HLT-NAACL 2003 Workshop on "Building and Using Parallel Texts: Data Driven Machine Translation and Beyond", Edomonton, May 2003. (with Ted Pedersen)
  • ACL 2002 Workshop on "Word Sense Disambiguation: Recent Advances and Future Directions", Philadelphia, July 2002. (with Phil Edmonds)


    resources
  • Senseval 2004
  • Workshop on Parallel Texts, 2003
  • Workshop on Parallel Texts 2005
  • Resources for Sentence and Word Alignment