Research
Research Interests:
My research area is Natural Language Processing (NLP). In
particular, I have worked on a unification-based parser called LINK.
LINK is a syntax-semantics integrated unification-based system
that achieves average-case linear-time performance for limited
domain texts. LINK gains this efficiency by encoding syntax,
semantics and domain knowledge in a uniform way, and by utilizing
all those information during parsing to prune unsuccessful
parses. Because of this, LINK gives an elegant and efficient
solution to parsing with unification grammars. In the current
implementation, we developed an algorithm called LC, which
is a variant of left-corner
parsing, and further improved the performance by an
optimization technique called lazy
unification. For my PhD thesis, I
formalized the algorithm in logic and proved the correctness of
the algorithm. Here is the link to my thesis "Left-corner parsing algorithm for
unification grammars".
I have also been involved in a project called FAQ
Finder, a joint research by the AI
groups at Northwestern University, University of California, Irvine and DePaul University.
FAQ Finder (online at Irvine or at U
of C) is a
web-based question-answering system which retrieves answers to
users' questions from FAQ files (thus it is a kind of Information
Retrieval system). I mainly worked on an NL parser which uses a
question grammar, and an automatic Q&A tagging module. Information on
recent progress is found here.
Recently I have also been interested in the area of Lexical
Semantics, in particular a phenomena called systematic
polysemy: senses of a word that are related in systematic and
predictable ways. Using WordNet as the
lexical resource, I used systematic polysemy to collapse similar word senses and
derive an appropriate level of sense granularity for semantic lexicon.
Publications
Refereed Journal Articles
- Tomuro, N. and Lytinen, S. (2004).
"Retrieval Models and Q&A Learning with FAQ Files"
(a book chapter). New Directions in Question Answering, p.
183-194. AAAI Press / The MIT Press.
- Tomuro, N. (2004).
"Question Terminology and Representation for Question Type
Classification". Journal of Terminology, 10 (1),
pp. 153-168.
- Tomuro, N. and Lytinen, S. (2001).
"Nonminimal
Derivations in Unification-based Parsing".
Computational Linguistics, Vol. 27 (2001), Number 2.
- Burke, R., Hammond, K., Kulyukin, V., Lytinen, S.,
Tomuro, N. and Schoenberg, S. (1997).
"Question
Answering from Frequently Asked Question Files:
Experiences with the FAQFinder System".
AI Magazine, Summer, 18 (2), pp. 57-66.
Refereed Conference & Workshop Papers
- Tomuro, N. and Shepitsen, A. (2009).
"Construction of Disambiguated Folksonomy
Ontologies Using Wikipedia". In Proceedings of the
workshop on The People’sWeb
Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources at the Association
for Computational Linguistics (ACL-09).
- Shepitsen, A. and Tomuro, N. (2009).
"Improving Diversity and Relevancy of E-commerce Recommender Systems Through
NLP Techniques". In Proceedings of the IADIS e-Commerce (EC
2009) Conference.
- Shepitsen, A. and Tomuro, N. (2009).
"Personalized
Search in Folksonomies with Ontological User Profiles".
In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference Intelligent Information
Systems (IIS 2009).
- Shepitsen, A. and Tomuro, N. (2009).
"Search in Social Tagging Systems Using Ontological User Profiles".
In Proceedings of the 3rd Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM
2009).
- Tomuro, N. and Lytinen, S. (2008).
"Polysemy in Lexical Semantics -- Automatic Discovery of Polysemous Senses
and Their Regularities". NYU
Symposium on
Semantic Knowledge Discovery, Organization and Use.
- Kanzaki, K., Tomuro, N. and Isahara, H. (2008).
"The
\"Close-Distant\" Relation of Adjectival Concepts Based on Self-Organizing
Map". In Proceedings of the workshop on Cognitive Aspects of
the Lexicon at the 22nd International Conference on Computational
Linguistics (Coling 2008).
- Kanzaki, K., Bond, F., Tomuro, N. and Isahara, H. (2008).
"Extraction of Attribute Concepts from Japanese Adjectives".
In Proceedings of the Sixth International Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC'08).
- Tomuro, N., Lytinen, S., Kanzaki, K. and Isahara, H. (2007).
"Clustering Using Feature Domain Similarity to Discover Word Senses for
Adjectives". In Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International
Conference on Semantic Computing
(ICSC-2007).
- Tomuro, N., Kanzaki, K. and Isahara, H. (2007).
"Discovering Word Senses for Polysemous Words Using Feature Domain
Similarity". In Proceedings of the Conference of the Pacific
Association for Computational Linguistics (PACLING-2007).
- Kanzaki, K. Tomuro, N. and Isahara, H. (2007).
"Extraction and Organization of Abstract Concepts that Categorize
Adjectives From Corpora". In Proceedings of the 4th International
Workshop on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon (GL-2007).
- Tomuro, N., Kanzaki, K. and Isahara, H. (2007).
“Self-organizing Conceptual Map and Taxonomy of Adjectives”.
In Proceedings of the 18th Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive
Science Conference (MAICS 2007).
- Tomuro, N. (2003).
"Interrogative reformulation patterns and acquisition of question
paraphrases". In Proceedings of the International
Workshop on Paraphrasing (IWP03) at ACL2003, Sapporo, Japan.
- Tomuro, N. (2002).
"Question Terminology and Representation for Question Type
Classification". In Proceedings of the 2nd
International Workshop on Computational Terminology (COMPUTERM02),
held at COLING-02, Taipei, Taiwan.
- Lytinen, S. and
Tomuro, N. (2002).
"The
Use of Question Types to Match Questions in FAQFinder". In Papers from the
2002
AAAI Spring Symposium on Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge
Bases, pp. 46-53.
- Tomuro, N. and Lytinen, S. (2001).
"Selecting Features for Paraphrasing Question Sentences".
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Automatic Paraphrasing at
Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium
(NLPRS 2001), Tokyo, Japan.
- Tomuro, N. and Lytinen, S. (2001).
"Abstract Left-corner Parsing for Unification Grammars".
In Proceedings of the Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium
(NLPRS 2001), Tokyo, Japan.
- Tomuro, N. (2001).
"Tree-cut and A Lexicon based on Systematic Polysemy".
In Proceedings of the North
American Chapter of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (NAACL2001).
- Tomuro, N. (2001).
”Systematic
Polysemy and Inter-annotator Disagreement: Empirical Examinations”.
In Proceedings of the first International Workshop on Generative
Approaches to Lexicon.
- Lytinen, S., Tomuro, N. and Repede, T. (2000).
"The Use of WordNet Sense
Tagging in FAQFinder". In Proceedings of the workshop on Artificial
Intelligence for Web Search at the 17th National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2000), Austin, TX.
- Tomuro, N. (2000).
"Automatic
Extraction of Systematic Polysemy Using Tree-cut".
In Proceedings of the workshop on Syntactic and
Semantic Complexity in Natural Language Processing
Systems at Language Technology Joint Conference,
Applied Natural Language Processing and the North
American Chapter of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (ANLP-NAACL2000), Seattle, WA, pp. 20-27.
- Tomuro, N., Alkoby, K., Berthiaume, A., Chomwong, P.,
Davidson, M., Furst, J., Konie, B., Lancaster, G.,
Lytinen, S., McDonald, J., Roychoudhuri, L., Toro, J. and
Wolfe, R. (2000).
"An
Alternative Method for Building A Database for American
Sign Language". In Proceedings of the conference on Technologies for
Persons with Disabilities (CSUN2000), Los Angeles, CA.
- Tomuro, N. (1998).
"Semi-automatic
Induction of Systematic Polysemy from WordNet".
In Proceedings of the workshop on Usage of
WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems at
the 17th International Conference on Computational
Linguistics (COLING-98) and the 36th Annual Meeting of
the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-98), Montreal,
Canada, pp. 108-114.
- Tomuro, N. (1998).
"Semi-automatic
Induction of Underspecified Semantic Classes".
In Proceedings of the workshop on Lexical Semantics
in Context: Corpus, Inference and Discourse at the
10th European Summer School in Logic, Language and
Information (ESSLLI-98), Saabruecken, Germany.
- Burke, R., Hammond, K., Kulyukin, V., Lytinen, S.,
Tomuro, N. and Schoenberg, S. (1997).
"Natural
Language Processing in the FAQFinder System: Results and
Prospects". In Papers from the 1997
AAAI Spring Symposium on Natural Language Processing
for the World Wide Web, pp. 17-26.
- Tomuro, N. (1996).
"Maximizing
Top-down Constraints for Unification-based Systems".
In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-96), Santa
Cruz, CA. pp. 381-383.
- Lytinen, S. and Tomuro, N. (1996).
"Left-corner
Unification-based Natural Language Processing".
In Proceedings of the 13th National Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96), Portland, OR,
pp. 1037-1043.
- Lytinen, S. and Tomuro, N. (1995).
"Steps
Toward Real-time Natural Language Processing".
In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society, Pittsburgh, PA, pp.
666-670.
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