Fall 2008
MAILING ADDRESS:
Computer Science Department, Email: cgomez at cs rochester edu
University of Rochester,
Rochester, NY 14627
RESEARCH INTEREST:
I am interested in how speakers use cognitive processes to bring together language knowledge and contextual information in language understanding and production. In particular, I am interested in natural occurring conversation between two people who have joint intentions (task-oriented dialogues). My work uses multidisciplinary methodologies from psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics to address how speakers plan their utterances, and, how we can model these dialogues from a computational and mathematical perspective.
Keywords: Corpus Linguistics, Dialogue Modeling, Discourse Analysis, Incremental Understanding and Production, Intention Recognition, Information Theory.
EDUCATION:
2004 - present. Joint Ph.D. in Computer Science and Linguistics. (Expected: May 2009)
University of Rochester, NY.
Dissertation: Non-Sentential Utterances: Incremental Interpretation and Production.
Committee: James Allen, Michael Tanenhaus, Greg Carlson, Lenhart Schubert, and Dan Gildea.
2004. M.S. in Computer Science.
University of Rochester, NY.
2002. Visiting Researcher in Computational Linguistics Group
University of Sheffield, UK.
2001. B.S. with Honors Industrial Engineering, Minor in Mathematics.
New Mexico State University (NMSU).
2000. Visiting Researcher.
Ericsson Brazil and Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
JOURNAL ARTICLES (IN PROGRESS):
Carlos Gómez Gallo, and T. Florian Jaeger. Memory, Complexity and Information Density in Incremental Syntactic Planning [Working Title].
REFEREED CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS:
Carlos Gómez Gallo, T. Florian Jaeger, and Ronald Smyth. Incremental Syntactic Planning across Clauses. Proceedings of 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 08). Washington, D.C. July, 2008.
Carlos Gómez Gallo, T. Florian Jaeger, James Allen, and Mary Swift. Production in a Multimodal Corpus: How Speakers Communicate Complex Actions. Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC-08). Marrakech, Morocco. May, 2008.
Carlos Gómez Gallo: Handling Non-Sentential Utterances in a Continuous Understanding Framework. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07). Vancouver, BC. July, 2007.
Carlos Gómez Gallo, Gregory Aist, James Allen, William de Beaumont, Sergio Coria, Whitney Gegg-Harrison, Joana Paulo Pardal and Mary Swift. Annotating Continuous Understanding in a Multimodal Dialogue Corpus. In Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DECALOG-07). Rovereto, Italy. May, 2007.
Gregory Aist, James Allen, Ellen Campana, Carlos Gómez Gallo, Scott Stoness, Mary Swift and Michael Tanenhaus. Incremental Dialogue System Faster than and Preferred to its Non-Incremental Counterpart. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-07), Nashville, TN. August, 2007.
Gregory Aist, James Allen, Ellen Campana, Carlos Gómez Gallo, Scott Stoness, Mary Swift and Michael Tanenhaus. Incremental Understanding in Human-Computer Dialogue and Experimental Evidence for Advantages over Non-Incremental Methods. Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DECALOG-07). Rovereto, Italy. May, 2007.
Gregory Aist, James Allen, Ellen Campana, Lucian Galescu, Carlos Gómez Gallo, Scott Stoness, Mary Swift and Michael Tanenhaus. Software Architectures for Incremental Understanding of Human Speech. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech-06). Pittsburgh, PA. September, 2006.
TECHNICAL REPORTS:
Carlos Gómez Gallo. Understanding Non-Sentential Utterances. Technical Report. University of Rochester. 2006.
Carlos Gómez Gallo. Intention Recognition and its Formalisms. Technical Report. University of Rochester. 2005.
ORAL PRESENTATIONS:
T. Florian Jaeger, Austin Frank, Carlos Gómez Gallo, and Susan Wagner-Cook. Rational Language Production: Evidence for Uniform Information Density. The 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA-09). San Francisco, CA. January, 2009.
Carlos Gómez Gallo, T. Florian Jaeger, and Ron Smyth. From Message to Syntax: Incremental Syntactic Planning beyond the Clausal Level. The 21st CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. Chapel Hill, NC. March, 2008.
Carlos Gómez Gallo. Contextual Complexity Affects Syntactic Planning. Invited Lecture to Formal Pragmatics Colloquium. University of Rochester. April, 2008.
Carlos Gómez Gallo. Dialogue Agents. Young Researchers Round Table on Spoken Dialogue
Systems Workshop co-located with InterSpeech07. Antwerp, Belgium. September, 2007.
Carlos Gómez Gallo. Corpus Development in the Fruit Carts Domain. Linguistics Graduate
Student Workshop. Mellon Humanities Corridor. University of Syracuse. May, 2007.
Carlos Gómez Gallo. Continuous Understanding. Big Picture Seminar. University of Rochester. June, 2007.
Carlos Gómez Gallo. Ellipsis and other Fragment Phenomena in Dialogue. Big Picture
Seminars. University of Rochester. August, 2006.
RESEARCH ASSISTANTSHIPS:
2008 – present: Discourse effects on ellipsis resolution in Picture NP.
With: Jeff Runner. Linguistics Department. University of Rochester.
• Implemented eye-tracking experiments on Exbuilder software.
2007 – present: Speech act planning based on resource limitations, contextual complexity and information content.
With: T. Florian Jaeger. Brain and Cognitive Science Department. University of Rochester.
• Demonstrated that speakers are sensitive to early complexity and information density when planning their utterances in task-oriented dialogues. Used language models to estimate information density in referring expressions.
• Created annotation scheme and directly supervised and trained three undergraduates in the annotation of corpora.
2007. Summer Intern.
With: Michael Johnston. AT&T, New Jersey, USA.
• Designed and implemented an algorithm that extracted information from user queries at AT&T Yellow Pages search engine. Performed data mining of desirable properties of companies to bootstrap an ontology data structure.
2004 – present: Incremental Interpretation of Utterances based on Semantic and Pragmatic Expectations.
With: James Allen. Computer Science Department. University of Rochester.
• Modified The Rochester Interactive Planning System (TRIPS) parser to incorporate semantic and pragmatic information to incremental syntactical processing. Showed that frequency effects of verb argument structure and intention recognition improved TRIPS parser’s accuracy and efficiency.
• Developed multimodal corpus of task-oriented dialogues in an eye-tracking experiment.
• Directly supervised and trained six undergraduates in an incremental annotation of multimodal data, using Anvil annotation software.
• Used machine learning algorithms to classify useful fragmentary output from TRIPS parser, based on logical form features, to build bigger semantic units for discourse processing.
2002. Email Summarization in a Personal Agent Architecture.
With: Yorick Wilks. University of Sheffield, UK.
• Developed an email summarization module that exploited dialogue in email threads to compute semantic similarities between sentences from original and replied emails, in collaboration with the European Union-funded project FaSIL.
2001. Conversational Agent as a Language Teaching Companion.
With: Ron Zacharski. Computing Research Laboratory, NMSU.
• Implemented a conversational agent using pattern matching and finite state automata techniques in order to help users with natural language learning activities.
2000. Statistical Market Predictions for Mobile Application.
With: Marcio Zanetti. Ericsson, Brazil.
• Created mathematical models to forecast automobile market in South America. Analyzed data from Ericsson’s mobile GPS devices.
TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIPS:
2008 Fall. Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (CSC 244/444).
14 undergraduate/graduate students. Computer Science Department. University of Rochester.
2008 Spring. Experimental Syntax (LIN 262/462).
12 undergraduate/graduate students. Linguistics Department, University of Rochester.
2007. Instructor of “Computational Linguistics: How to converse with computers?”
9 high-school students. Rochester Scholars.
Designed and taught a two week course on “Computational Linguistics: How to converse with computers?” to highly motivated high school students.
2006 Spring. Introduction to Data Structures (CSC 172).
60 undergraduate students. Computer Science Department. University of Rochester.
2005 Spring. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (CSC 242/424).
30 undergraduate students. Computer Science Department. University of Rochester.
2004 Autumn. Computer Programming (CSC 171).
54 undergraduate students. Computer Science Department. University of Rochester.
Prepared to teach courses on the following areas:
Computational Linguistics: Part of Speech Tagging, Word Sense Disambiguation, Parsing, Compositional Semantics.
Artificial Intelligence: Search, Logical Reasoning, Resolution, Probabilistic Reasoning, Language Understanding.
Psycholinguistics: Animal Communication, Perception of Sounds, Lexical Access, Understanding and Production Sentence Processing, Language Acquisition.
Experimental Linguistics: Offline and Online Methods. Magnitude Estimation, Scene Verification, Self-Pace Reading, Eye-tracking.
Statistical Analysis of Linguistic Data: Sampling, Hypothesis Testing, Regression, Mixed Effect Models.
OTHER TEACHING EXPERIENCE:
2001. Learning Facilitator.
Assisted Ronald McNair scholars in pursuing graduate degrees. This program paired low-income underrepresented NMSU students with faculty to do undergraduate research.
1998-1999. Instructor.
Chaparral Middle School, HELP, Home Education Livelihood Program, Chaparral, NM.
Tutored mono/bilingual farmers, migrant workers, and low-income families in southern New Mexico on basic skills, such as applying for jobs and writing a résumé, for living in the U.S.A.
AWARDS:
2003-2009. Student Assistantship University of Rochester.
2008. Student Travel Grant CUNY-08.
2007. Student Travel Grant AAAI-07 Doctoral Consortium.
1999-2001. Dean's List NMSU.
2001. Debra Orozco Graduate Student Scholarship, NMSU.
1999. International Teaching Assistantship Screening Test Approved, NMSU.
1999. Certified Advanced Tutoring Certificate by College Reading & Learning Association.
ACADEMIC SERVICE:
2008. Co-organizer of Workshop in Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial-08) on: Young Researchers Round Table of Dialogue Systems.
2007 - present. Co-organizer Center of Language Sciences Colloquia.
2006-2007. Member of Graduate Student Admissions Committee in Computer Science Department, University of Rochester.
2005-2007. President of Graduate Organization Group, University of Rochester.
2004. Organizer of Intention Recognition Colloquium, University of Rochester.
2001. Member of Mesilla Valley Film Festival Committee. Las Cruces, NM.
PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS:
Association of Computational Linguistics.
Linguistic Society of America.
Cognitive Science Society.
LANGUAGE SKILLS:
Spanish: Native.
English: Near native.
Portuguese: Advanced.
French: Intermediate.
COMPUTER SKILLS:
Platforms: Linux, Mac OS, Windows.
Programming: C++, Java, Python, PERL, Common Lisp.
Experiment Scripting: PsyScope, Exbuilder, E-Prime, Linger.
