Google at ACL 2011

Posted by Ryan McDonald and Fernando Pereira, Research Team

The Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is one of the premier conferences for language and text technologies. Many employees at Google have strong roots in the community of researchers that attend this meeting, including many of our researchers working on machine translation and speech.

At this years conference, Google is particularly well represented. The General Chair is Dekang Lin and a few Googlers are serving as technical Area Chairs (in addition to the plethora of Googlers that reviewed papers for the conference). Google is also a Platinum Sponsor of ACL this year.

Research advances at Google can be seen throughout the conference’s technical content. Below is a complete list of Googler-authored or co-authored papers in the main conference. We want to give special emphasis to this year’s best paper award, given to “Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bilingual Graph-Based Projections” by CMU graduate student and Google intern Dipanjan Das and his internship advisor Slav Petrov. ACL is an extremely selective conference and this award speaks volumes to the importance of syntactic analysis and using bilingual corpora to project syntactic resources from resource rich languages (like English) to other languages. Congratulations Dipanjan and Slav!

Googlers are also involved in two of this year’s tutorials. Marius Pasca will present “Web Search Queries as a Corpus” and Kuzman Ganchev and his colleagues will teach about “Rich Prior Knowledge in Learning for Natural Language Processing”. Finally, Katja Filippova and her colleagues are running a workshop on “Monolingual Text-to-Text Generation”.

ACL will take place this year in Portland from June 19th to June 24th.

Papers by Googlers (a * indicates a paper that will be linked to after the conference):

Ranking Class Labels Using Query Sessions*
Marius Pasca

Fine-Grained Class Label Markup of Search Queries*
Joseph Reisinger and Marius Pasca

Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bilingual Graph-Based Projections
Dipanjan Das and Slav Petrov

Large-Scale Cross-Document Coreference Using Distributed Inference and Hierarchical Models
Sameer Singh, Amarnag Subramanya, Fernando Pereira and Andrew McCallum

Piggyback: Using Search Engines for Robust Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition
Stefan Rüd, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Jens Müller and Hinrich Schütze

Beam-Width Prediction for Efficient Context-Free Parsing
Nathan Bodenstab, Aaron Dunlop, Keith Hall and Brian Roark

Language-independent compound splitting with morphological operations
Klaus Macherey, Andrew Dai, David Talbot, Ashok Popat and Franz Och

Model-Based Aligner Combination Using Dual Decomposition
John DeNero and Klaus Macherey

Binarized Forest to String Translation
Hao Zhang, Licheng Fang, Peng Xu and Xiaoyun Wu

Semi-supervised Latent Variable Models for Fine-grained Sentiment Analysis
Oscar Tackstrom and Ryan McDonald