Computer Science > Conference > UTD CS Professors Publish Sixteen Research Papers at Three of the World’s Leading Conferences in Artificial Intelligence

UTD CS Professors Publish Sixteen Research Papers at Three of the World’s Leading Conferences in Artificial Intelligence

UT Dallas Computer Science professors and their PhD students, working in the area of intelligent systems, published sixteen papers in three of the most prestigious conferences in artificial intelligence: (i) six papers in the 30th AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) 2016 Conference on Artificial Intelligeance, (ii) four papers in the 29th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2015), and (iii) six papers in the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2015). These UT Dallas professors included Drs. Vibhav Gogate, Latifur Khan, Yang Liu, Vincent Ng, Nicholas Ruozzi, and Haim Schweitzer. All three conferences are extremely selective in accepting research papers and each paper submitted to the conference is rigorously peer-reviewed by multiple experts.

The CS Department at UT Dallas has a large group of faculty members focused on research in intelligent systems. Several of the faculty members conduct their research under the umbrella of the Institute for Human Language and Technology (HLT) directed by Dr. Sanda Harabagiu. Areas of interest within intelligent systems include natural language processing, machine learning, speech processing, computer vision, automatic question-answering and automated reasoning.

The AAAI Conference:

The Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), the Twenty-Eighth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI), and the Sixth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI), were held jointly this past February from the 12th to the 17th in Phoenix, Arizona. The AAAI technical program featured substantial, original research, and best practices. Sponsors of the 2016 AAAI Conference included the Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of Southern California (USC)/Information Sciences Institute, Associations for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGAI), Baidu Research, CRA Computing Community Consortium (CCC), Disney Research, IBM Research, Infosys, Lionbridge, Microsoft Research, National Science Foundation (NSF), and Yahoo! Labs.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines. The mission of the AAAI conference is to promote theoretical and applied AI research as well as intellectual interchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines.

The following is a list of papers authored by UT Dallas faculty members that appeared in the AAAI Conference:

  1. “On Parameter Tying by Quantization,” Li Chou (UTD), Somdeb Sarkhel (UTD), Nicholas Ruozzi (UTD), and Vibhav Gogate (UTD).
  2. “Scalable Training of Markov Logic Networks using Approximate Counting,” Somdeb Sarkhel (UTD), Deepak Venugopal (UTD), Tuan Anh Pham (UTD), Parag Singla (IIT Delhi),and Vibhav Gogate (UTD).
  3. “Learning Ensembles of Cutset Networks,” Tahrima Rahman (UTD) and Vibhav Gogate (UTD).
  4. “SAND: Semi-Supervised Adaptive Novel Class Detection and Classification over Data Stream,” Ahsanul Haque, Latifur Khan, and Michael Baron.
  5. Unsupervised Feature Selection by Heuristic Search with Provable Bounds on Suboptimality,” Hiromasa Arai (UTD), Ke Xu (UTD), Crystal Maung (UTD), Haim Schweitzer (UTD).
  6. “Joint Inference over a Lightly Supervised Information Extraction Pipeline: Towards Event Coreference Resolution for Resource-Scarce Languages” Chen Chen (UTD) and Vincent Ng (UTD).

The NIPS Conference:

The 29th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2015) took place in Montréal, Canada, from December 7th to 12th. The Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation is a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to foster the exchange of research on neural information processing systems in their biological, technological, mathematical, and theoretical aspects. Neural information processing is a field that benefits from combining these disciplines into computational sciences. Sponsors of the event included Adobe, Alibaba Group, Amazon, Apple, Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), Disney Research, Facebook, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Netflix, Oracle, and Twitter.

The conference included 6 invited talks, 38 workshops, demo and poster sessions, and 403 accepted papers, selected from a total of 1838 submissions considered by the program committee. Among the papers accepted by the NIPS 2015 conference, several were submitted by UT Dallas faculty members Drs. Vibhav Gogate, Nicholas Ruozzi, and their PhD students. Papers presented at the NIPS 2015 conference appeared in “Advances in Neural Information Processing 28,” edited by Daniel D. Lee, Masashi Sugiyama, Corinna Cortes, Neil Lawrence, and Roman Garnett.

The following is a list of NIPS 2015 authored by UT Dallas faculty:

  1. “Bounding the Cost of Search-Based Lifted Inference,” David Smith (UTD) and Vibhav Gogate (UTD).
  2. “Fast Lifted MAP Inference via Partitioning,” Somdeb Sarkhel (UTD), Parag Singla (I.T Delhi), and Vibhav Gogate (UTD).
  3. “Lifted Inference Rules with Constraints,” Happy Mittal (I.I.T. Delhi), Anuj Mahajan (I.I.T. Delhi), Vibhav Gogate, and Parag Singla (I.I.T. Delhi).
  4. “Approximate MAP Inference in Continuous MRFs,“ Nicholas Ruozzi (UTD).

The ACL Conference:

UT Dallas researchers also published multiple papers in the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2015). The annual meeting of the ACL is devoted to “substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of automated language processing.” The conference was held in Beijing, China, from July 26th through August 31st. The conference was sponsored by multiple companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon.com.

The following is a list of papers authored by UT Dallas faculty members and their PhD students:

  1. “Using Tweets to Help Sentence Compression for News Highlights Generation.” Zhongyu Wei, Yang Liu, Chen Li, and Wei Gao.
  2. “Improving Named Entity Recognition in Tweets via Detecting Non-standard Words.” Chen Li and Yang Liu.
  3. “Feature Selection in Kernel Space: A Case Study on Dependency Parsing.” Xian Qian and Yang Liu.
  4. “Modeling Argument Strength in Student Essays.” Isaac Persing and Vincent Ng. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Pages 543-552, 2015.
  5. “Sieve-Based Entity Linking for the Biomedical Domain.” Jennifer D’Souza and Vincent Ng. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Pages 297-302, 2015.
  6. “Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution: A Joint Unsupervised Discourse-Aware Model Rivaling State-of-the-Art Resolvers.” Chen Chen and Vincent Ng. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational. Pages 320-326.

About the UT Dallas Computer Science Department

The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 1,600 bachelor’s-degree students, more than 1,100 master’s students, 160 PhD students, and 80 faculty members, as of Fall 2015. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.

*Photo Courtesy of Google Images*