Nitin Madnani

Mailing address: Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
AVW 3126G
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: (O) +1-301-405-6746
E-mail: (first initial+last name)@umiacs.umd.edu
PGP Public Key: pubkey.asc
Research Interests: Statistical Machine Translation; Automatic Paraphrase Generation & Recognition; Automatic Text Summarization; Machine Learning
Blog: Colorful Green Ideas

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park. I am also a graduate research assistant in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, where I work with my advisor, Bonnie Dorr. My work is focused on leveraging statistical machine translation techniques to generate and recognize paraphrases.

Software

Python & Perl wrappers for SRILMs: Wrappers that will allow you to read and query an SRI language model directly in your Python and Perl code.
clusterinfo: A Python script that displays current usage of a PBS-based cluster in a more condensed and easier-to-read format.
LM Server: An XML-RPC server for an SRILM language model written in Python. Allows multiple clients to query the same language model that's loaded in memory in server mode.

Publications

Combining Open-Source with Research to Re-engineer a Hands-on Introductory NLP Course. 2008. Proceedings of the Third ACL Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics (TeachCL-08). Nitin Madnani and Bonnie Dorr. (To appear)
TREC 2007 ciQA Task: University of Maryland. 2007. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). Nitin Madnani, Jimmy Lin, and Bonnie Dorr.
Using Paraphrases for Parameter Tuning in Statistical Machine Translation. 2007. Proceedings of the Second ACL Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT-07). Nitin Madnani, Necip Fazil Ayan, Philip Resnik, Bonnie Dorr.
Getting Started on Natural Language Processing with Python. 2007. ACM Crossroads, Volume 13, Issue 4. Nitin Madnani. [Note: The PDF version has been completely revised since the official ACM version to keep up to date with the changes made to the software used in the article. ]
Measuring Variability in Sentence Ordering for News Summarization. 2007. To appear, Proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG). Nitin Madnani, Rebecca Passonneau, John Conroy, Necip Fazil Ayan, Bonnie Dorr, Judith Klavans, Dianne O'Leary and Judith Schlesinger.
Multiple Alternative Sentence Compressions for Automatic Text Summarization. 2007. Proceedings of the Document Understanding Conference (DUC) at HLT/NAACL . Nitin Madnani, David Zajic, Bonnie Dorr, Necip Fazil Ayan and Jimmy Lin.
The Hiero Machine Translation System: Extensions, Evaluation, and Analysis. 2005. Proceedings of HLT/EMNLP . David Chiang, Adam Lopez, Nitin Madnani, Christof Monz, Philip Resnik and Michael Subotin.
Rapid Porting of DUSTer to Hindi. 2003. ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing, Volume 2, Issue 2 . Bonnie J. Dorr, Necip Fazil Ayan, Nizar Habash, Nitin Madnani, and Rebecca Hwa.

Invited Talks

Using Paraphrases for Parameter Tuning in Statistical Machine Translation. 2007. GALE Annual Technical Presentation. Nitin Madnani, Necip Fazil Ayan, Philip Resnik and Bonnie J. Dorr.

Posters

Exploring Emily Dickinson Letters. June 2005. HCIL 22nd Annual Symposium and Open House, University of Maryland. Catherine Plaisant, Nitin Madnani, Matt Kirschenbaum, Martha Nell Smith, Tanya Clement, Greg Lord.
Portable Divergence Unraveling - The Case of Hindi. 2004. Research Review Day, University of Maryland. Nitin Madnani, Necip Fazil Ayan, Bonnie Dorr, Nizar Habash, Christof Monz.

Other Talks & Presentations

Expectation Maximization. 2004. Advanced NLP Seminar
Decoding in Statistical Machine Translation. 2006. UMD StatMT Reading Group

Education

M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, 2003
B.E. in Electrical Engineering, Punjab Engineering College, India, 2000

Assorted Experience

Instructor, Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Fall 2007
Research Intern, Natural Language Technologies Group, IBM T J Watson Research Center, Yorktown, New York, Summer 2005
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Fall 2004
Research Intern, Netrino LLC, Maryland, Summer 2002

Service

Reviewer, Squibs and Discussions, Computational Linguistics
Reviewer, ACL 2007
Reviewer, IJCNLP 2005