Language and Interaction Resesarch [LAIR]

2017

Detecting Clinically Related Content in Online Patient Posts. C. Vandam, S. Kanthawala, W. Pratt, J. Y. Chai, and J. Huh. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2017
Interactive Learning of State Representation through Natural Language Instruction and Explanation . Q. Gao, L. She, and J. Chai. AAAI Fall Symposium on Natural Communication for Human-Robot Collaboration, Arlington, VA, November 9-11, 2017.
Interactive Learning of Grounded Verb Semantics towards Human-Robot Communication . L. She and J. Y. Chai. Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Vancouver, Canada, July 31-August 4, 2017.

2016

Jointly Learning Grounded Task Structures from Language Instruction and Visual Demonstration . C. Liu, S. Yang, S. Sadiya, N. Shukla, Y. He, S. Zhu, and J. Y. Chai. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Austin, Texas, November 1-5, 2016.
Physical Causality of Action Verbs in Grounded Language Understanding.Q. Gao, M. Doering, S. Yang, and J. Y. Chai. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Berlin, Germany, August 7-12, 2016.
Incremental Acquisition of Verb Hypothesis Space towards Physical World Interaction . L. She and J. Y. Chai. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Berlin, Germany, August 7-12, 2016.
Grounded Semantic Role Labeling . S. Yang, Q. Gao, C. Liu, C. Xiong, S. Zhu, and J. Y. Chai. Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), San Diego, CA, June 12-17, 2016.
Task Learning through Visual Demonstration and Situated Dialogue. C. Liu, J. Y. Chai, N. Shukla, and S. Zhu. AAAI 2016 Workshop on Symbiotic Cognitive Systems, Phoenix, AZ, Feb 12-17, 2016.
What's Hot in Human Language Technology: Highlights from NAACL HLT 2015. J. Y. Chai, A. Sarkar, and R. Mihalcea. Proceedings of the 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Phoenix, AZ, Feb 12-17, 2016.

2015

Referential Grounding towards Mediating Shared Perceptual Basis in Situated Dialogue. C. Liu, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2015.
Embodied Collaborative Referring Expression Generation in Situated Human-Robot Dialogue. R. Fang, M. Doering, and J. Y. Chai. Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Portland, Oregon, March 2-5, 2015.
Exception Handling for Natural Language Control of Robots. L. She, Y. Jia, N, Xi, and J. Y. Chai. Extended Abstract. Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Portland, Oregon, March 2-5, 2015.
Learning to Mediate Perceptual Differences in Situated Human-Robot Dialogue. C. Liu and J. Y. Chai. Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Austin, Texas, January 25-30, 2015.

2014

Referring Expression Generation towards Mediating Shared Perceptual Basis in Situated Dialogue. R. Fang, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2014.
Collaborative Models for Referring Expression Generation towards Situated Dialogue. R. Fang, M. Doering, and J. Y. Chai. Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Quebec, Canada, August, 2014.
Probabilistic Labeling for Efficient Referential Grounding based on Collaborative Discourse. C. Liu, L. She, R. Fang, and J. Y. Chai. Proceedings of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Short Paper, Baltimore, MD, June 22-26, 2014.
Teaching Robots New Actions through Natural Language Instructions. L. She, Y. Cheng, J. Y. Chai, Y. Jia, S. Yang, and N. Xi. The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Edinburgh, UK, August 25-29,2014.
Back to the Blocks World: Learning New Actions through Situated Human-Robot Dialogue. L. She, S. Yang, Y. Cheng, Y. Jia, J. Y. Chai, and N. Xi. Proceedings of 15th SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, Philadelphia, PA, June 18-20, 2014.
Perceptive Feedback for Natural Language Control of Robotic Operations. Y. Jia, N. Xi, J. Y. Chai, Y. Cheng, R. Fang, and L. She. 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Hong Kong, China, May 31 - June 7, 2014.
Collaborative Effort towards Common Ground in Situated Human-Robot Dialogue. J. Y. Chai, L. She, R. Fang, S. Ottarson, C. Littley, C. Liu, and K. Hanson. The 9th ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Bielefeld, Germany, March 3-6, 2014.

2013

Shared Gaze in Situated Referential Grounding: An Empirical Study. C. Liu, R. Fang, and J. Y. Chai, in Eye Gaze in Intelligent User Interfaces, eds. Y. Nakano, C. Conati, and T. Bader. pp.23-39, Springer, 2013.
Towards Situated Dialogue: Revisiting Referring Expression Generation. R. Fang, C. Liu, L. She, and J. Y. Chai. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Seattle, WA, October, 2013.
Modeling Collaborative Referring for Situated Referential Grounding. C. Liu, R. Fang, L. She, and J. Y. Chai. The 14th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 78-86. Metz, Fance August 2013.

2012

Semantic Role Labeling of Implicit Arguments for Nominal Predicates, M. Gerber and J. Y. Chai, Computational Linguistics, vol. 38, issue 4, Pages 755-798, November 2012.
Integrating Word Acquisition and Referential Grounding towards Physical World Interaction. R. Fang, C. Liu, and J. Y. Chai. The 14th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interactions (ICMI), Santa Monica, CA, October 22-26, 2012
Online Adaptation for Mobile Device Text Input Personalization. T. Baldwin, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2012.
Towards Mediating Shared Perceptual Basis in Situated Dialogue. C. Liu, R. Fang, and J. Y. Chai. The 13th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, Seoul, Korea, July 2012. Best Paper Nominee
Autonomous Self-Assessment of Autocorrections: Exploring Text Message Dialogues. T. Baldwin and J. Y. Chai. 2012 Conference of the North America Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), pp. 710-719, Montreal, Canada, June 3-8, 2012.
Towards Online Adaptation and Personalization of Key-Target Resizing for Mobile Devices. T. Baldwin and J. Y. Chai. ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), pp. 11-20, Lisbon, Portugal, February 14-17, 2012.

2011

Beyond Normalization: Pragmatics of Word Form in Text Messages. T. Baldwin and J. Y. Chai. Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing. Chiang Mai, Thailand, November 2011.
A Joint Model for Implicit Arguments for Nominal Predicates . M. Gerber, J. Y. Chai, and R. Bart. Proceedings of the ACL 2011 Workshop on Relational Models of Semantics.
Eye Gaze for Reference Resolution in Multimodal Conversational Interfaces. Z. Prasov, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2011.
Semantic Role Labeling of Implicit Arguments for Nominal Predicates. M. Gerber, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2011.

2010

An Investigation of Semantic Representation in Conversation Entailment. C. Zhang and J. Y. Chai.Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), MIT, MA, October, 2010.
Eye Gaze with Speech Recognition Hypotheses to Resolve Exophoric References in Situated Dialogue. Z. Prasov and J. Y. Chai. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). MIT, MA. October 2010.
Ambiguities in Spatial Language Understanding in Situated Human Robot Dialogue. C. Liu, J. Walker, and J. Y. Chai. AAAI 2010 Fall Symposium on Dialogue with Robots. Arlington, VA. November 2010.
Hand Gestures in Disambiguating Types of You Expressions in Multiparty Meetings. T. Baldwin, J. Y. Chai, and K. Kirchhoff. The 11th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, Tokyo, Japan, September, 2010.
Natural Language Inference: from Textual Entailment to Conversation Entailment . C. Zhang, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2010.
A Study of Implicit Arguments for Nominal Predicates. M. Gerber and J. Y. Chai. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Uppsala, Sweden. July 11-16, 2010. Best Long Paper Award
Context-based Word Acquisition for Situated Dialogue in a Virtual World. S. Qu and J. Y. Chai. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Volume 37, pp.347-377, March 2010.

2009

Communicative Gestures in Reference Resolution in Multiparty Meetings.. T. Baldwin, J. Y. Chai, and K. Kirchhoff. The 11th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI). Cambridge, MA, USA, November 2-6, 2009.
Between Linguistic Attention and Gaze Fixat ions in Multimodal Conversational Interfaces . R. Fang, J. Y. Chai, and F. Ferreira. The 11th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI). Cambridge, MA, USA, November 2-6, 2009.
What do We Know about Conversation Participants: Experiments on Conversation Entailment. C. Zhang and J. Y. Chai. The 10th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, London, UK, September, 2009.
The Role of Interactivity in Human Machine Conversation for Automated Word Acquisition. S. Qu and J. Y. Chai. The 10th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, London, UK, Sep tember, 2009.
The Role of Implicit Argumentation in Nominal SRL . M. Gerber, J. Chai, and A. Meyers. The 2009 Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL-09), Boulder, CO, June 2009.
Incorporating Non-Verbal Modalities in Spoken Language Understanding for Multimodal Conversational Systems. S. Qu, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2009.

2008

Incorporating Temporal and Semantic Information with Eye Gaze for Automatic Word Acquisition in Multimodal Conversational Systems. S. Qu and J. Chai. Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Honolulu, October 2008.
Class-based Nominal Semantic Role Labeling: a preliminary investigation. M. Gerber and J. Chai. Proceedings of the Fifth Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium. East Lansing, MI, May, 2008.
What’s in a Gaze? The Role of Eye-Gaze in Reference Resolution in Multimodal Conversational Interfaces. Z. Prasov and J. Chai. ACM 12th International Conference on Intelligent User interfaces (IUI). Canary Islands, Jan 13-17, 2008.
Beyond Attention: The Role of Deictic Gesture in Intention Recognition in Multimodal Conversational Interfaces. S. Qu and J. Chai. ACM 12th International Conference on Intelligent User interfaces (IUI). Canary Islands, Jan 13-17, 2008.

2007

Michigan State University at the 2007 TREC ciQA Task. C. Zhang, M. Gerber, T. Baldwin, S. Emelander, J. Chai, R. Jin, TREC 2007.
Discourse Processing for Context Question Answering based on Linguistic Knowledge. M. Sun and J. Chai. Knowledge-based Systems, Special Issues on Intelligent User Interfaces, Volume 20, Issue 6, pp. 511-526, August 2007.
Automated Vocabulary Acquisition and Interpretation in Multimodal Conversational Systems. Y. Liu, J. Chai, and R. Jin. The 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), Prague, Czech Republic, June 23-30, 2007.
An Exploration of Eye Gaze in Spoken Language Processing for Multimodal Conversational Interfaces. S. Qu and J. Chai. 2007 Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL-07), Rochester NY, April, 2007.
Eye Gaze for Attention Prediction in Multimodal Human Machine Conversation. Z. Prasov, J. Chai, and H. Jeong. The AAAI 2007 Spring Symposium on Interaction Challenges for Artificial Assistants, Palo Alto, CA. March 2007.
An Empirical Investigation of User Term Feedback in Targeted Image Search via Text-based Retrieval. J. Chai, C. Zhang, and R. Jin. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Vol 25(1), February 2007.

2006

Linguistic Knowledge based Discourse Modeling for Context Question Answering. M. Sun, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2006.
Salience Modeling based on Non-verbal Modalities for Spoken Language Understanding. S. Qu and J. Chai. ACM 8th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI), pp. 193-200, Banff, Canada, November 2-4, 2006.
Cognitive Principles in Robust Multimodal Interpretation. J. Chai, Z. Prasov, and S. Qu. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Vol 27, pp. 55-83, 2006.
Towards Conversational QA: Automated Identification of Problematic Situations and User Intent. J. Chai, C. Zhang, and T. Baldwin. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics/Association for Computational Linguistics (COLING/ACL-06) Poster Session, pp. 57-64, Sydney, Australia, July 17-21, 2006.
Automated Performance Assessment in Interactive Question Answering. J. Chai, T. Baldwin, and C. Zhang. Proceedings of the 29th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development on Information Retrieval (SIGIR2006), pp. 631-632, Seattle, USA, August 6-11, 2006.
Predicting User Attention using Eye Gaze in Conversational Interfaces. Z. Prasov and J. Chai. The Third Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquim (MCLC). Urbana-Champaign, IL. May 20-21, 2006.
Topic Term Identification for Context Question Answering. M. Gerber and J. Chai. The Third Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquim (MCLC). Urbana-Champaign, IL. May 20-21, 2006.
Towards Intelligent QA Interfaces: Discourse Processing for Context Questions. M. Sun and J. Chai. ACM 11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI-06), pp. 163-170, Sydney, Australia, Jan 29- Feb 1, 2006.

2005

A Salience Driven Approach to Robust Input Interpretation in Multimodal Conversational Systems. J. Chai and S. Qu. Conferences on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP), pp. 217-224, Vancouver, Canada, October 6-8, 2005.
Linguistic Theories in Efficient Multimodal Reference Resolution: an Empirical Investigation. J. Chai, Z. Prasov, J. Blaim, and R. Jin. The 10th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI-05), pp. 43-50, ACM, San Diego, CA, January 9-12, 2005.
MIND: A Context-based Multimodal Interpretation Framework. J. Chai, S. Pan, and M. Zhou. Conversational Systems, Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction in Multimodal Dialogue Systems. Eds. O. Bernsen , L. Dybkjaer and? J. van Kuppevelt, pp. 265-283, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005.
Learn to Weight Terms in Information Retrieval using Category Information. R. Jin, J. Chai, and L. Si. The 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 353-360, Bonn, Germany, Aug 7-11, 2005.
User Term Feedback in Interactive Text-based Image Retrieval. C. Zhang, J. Chai, and R. Jin. The 28th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2005), pp. 51-58, Brazil. August 15-19, 2005.
A Maximum Coherence Model for Dictionary-based Cross-language Information Retrieval. Y. Liu, R. Jin, and J. Chai. The 28th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2005), pp. 536-543, Brazil. August 15-19, 2005.

2004

Optimization in Multimodal Interpretation. J. Chai, P. Hong, M. Zhou, and Z. Prasov. The 42nd Annual Conference of Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 1-8, Barcelona, Spain. July 22-24, 2004.
Performance Evaluation and Error Analysis for Multimodal Interpretation in Conversational Systems. J. Chai, Z. Prasov, and P. Hong. Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2004 (companion volume), Boston, MA, May 3-7, 2004.
A Probabilistic Approach to Reference Resolution in Multimodal User Interfaces. J. Chai, P. Hong, and M. Zhou. Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI-04), pp. 70-77, ACM, Madeira, Portugal, January 13-16, 2004.
Regularizing Translation Models for Better Automatic Image Annotation. F. Kang, R. Jin, and J. Chai. The 13th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Washington D. C., November 8-13, 2004.
Automatic Image Annotation via Coherent Language Model and Active Learning. R. Jin, J. Chai, and L. Si. The 12th ACM Annual Conference on Multimedia (ACM-MM), New York, October 10-16, 2004.
An Automated Weighting Scheme for Collaborative Filtering. R. Jin, J. Chai, and L. Si. The 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2004), pp. 337-344, Sheffield, UK. July 25-29, 2004.
Discourse Structure for Context Question Answering . J. Chai and R. Jin. Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2004 Workshop on Pragmatics in Question Answering, Boston, MA. May 3-7, 2004.
MSU at ImageCLEF: Cross Lanugage and Interactive Image Retrieval. V. Bansal, C. Zhang, J. Y. Chai, and R. Jin. In Proceedings of CLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum), pp. 805-815. Bath, UK, September 15-17, 2004.