benhixon. links, interests, papers, talks, etc.

I'm at CSE@UW. See my more up-to-date homepage.

Recently about me

• September 2013: supported by an NSF Graduate Research fellowship
• June 2013: gave a NAACL talk
• September 2012: starting my Ph.D at UW. Will be working on Open IE with Oren Etzioni
• Summer 2012: interning at Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems
  Working with Becky Passonneau on extracting SDS manager policies from backend DBs
• May 2012: Graduated from Hunter College CUNY with a degree in computer science
  Lots of thanks to my fabulous mentor Susan Epstein

My projects and papers

2013

• Open Dialogue Management for Relational Databases. Hixon, Passonneau. NAACL 2013.
• Similarity and Plausible Recommendations. Epstein, Osisek, Hixon, Passonneau. CogSys 2013.

2012

• Semantic Specificity in Spoken Dialogue Requests. Hixon, Passonneau, Epstein. SIGdial 2012.

2011

• Phonemic similarity metrics to compare pronunciation methods (slides). Hixon, Schneider,
  Epstein. Interspeech 2011.
• Phoneme substitution weights from our Interspeech paper: wpsm.txt, wpsm.xls

2010

• joined The Loqui Project
• joined Susan L. Epstein's Machine Learning research group

Talks I gave as an undergrad about other people's papers (my slides so my mistakes!)

Epstein Lab Spring 2012

• discussion of Large-Scale Cross-Document Coreference Using Distributed Inference and
  Hierarchical Models. Sameer Singh et al. ACL 2011.

Epstein Lab Fall 2011

• discussion of Frustratingly easy domain adaptation. Hal Daumé III. ACL 2007.
• discussion of Toward an Architecture for Never-Ending Language Learning.
  Carlson et al. AAAI 2010.

in Advanced 3D Algorithms, CUNY Grad Center, Fall 2011

• discussion of 3-D Scene Analysis via Sequenced Predictions over Points and
  Regions. Xiong et al. ICRA 2011.

old links of potential interest

is speech dead?

• Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition
• Speech scientists are dead. Interaction designers are dead. Who is next?
• Un-rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Life of Speech Recognition
• Death or birth?

the digital humanities - more buzzwords, or a worthwhile pursuit?

• Stanley Fish. The Digital Humanities and Interpretation
• Why Derrida would be a computer science major today

thoughts on transfer learning

• What is transfer learning and why does it matter?

NLP links

• Peter Norvig
• Language Log
• On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
• NLPers

ML links

• Tom Mitchell's Machine Learning lectures

tech links

• Hacker News
• Techdirt
• ReadWriteWeb
• The Next Web
• stackoverflow
• mashable