Irene Langkilde

Timeline

1. 1998

   Two papers with Kevin Knight

   In August 1998, she and Kevin Knight publish "Generation that Exploits Corpus-Based Statistical Knowledge" in the proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Montreal. Their paper "The Practical Value of N-Grams Is in Generation" appears in the proceedings of the Natural Language Generation workshop in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, in August 1998.

2. 2000–2001

   Forest-based statistical sentence generation

   She publishes "Forest-Based Statistical Sentence Generation" at the first meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2000. In November 2001, she gives a talk titled "Statistical Sentence Generation" at a University of Maryland symposium on academic careers in computer science, where she describes Nitrogen, a sentence generator of about 200,000 words and concepts.

3. 2002

   Ph.D. under Kevin Knight

   She earns a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 2002 with Kevin Knight as advisor, writing the dissertation "Automatic Sentence Generation Using a Hybrid Statistical Model of Lexical Collocations and Syntactic Relations". In July 2002, she publishes "An Empirical Verification of Coverage and Correctness for a General-Purpose Sentence Generator" at the International Natural Language Generation Conference in Harriman, New York.

4. By 2005

   Assistant professor at BYU

   By 2005, she is an assistant professor at Brigham Young University and one of four new members elected to the board of SIGGEN, the special interest group on natural language generation.

5. 2006

   A Penn Treebank dependency corpus

   In 2006, she and Justin Betteridge publish "A Factored Functional Dependency Transformation of the English Penn Treebank for Probabilistic Surface Generation" at LREC 2006, describing a featurized functional dependency corpus derived from the Penn Treebank. Each word in the corpus carries over three dozen features that describe the functional syntactic structure of a sentence.

6. 2007

   ASGRE realizer and concurrent constraint programming

   In September 2007, she publishes "Declarative syntactic processing of natural language using concurrent constraint programming and probabilistic dependency modeling" at the Workshop on Using Corpora for Natural Language Generation in Copenhagen, and in 2007 she writes the template-based realizer used for the ASGRE 2007 challenge, listed under Brighton University.

7. June 2009

   Constraint programming for syntactic processing

   In June 2009, she publishes "A Constraint Programming Approach to Probabilistic Syntactic Processing" at the Workshop on Integer Linear Programming for Natural Language Processing in Boulder, Colorado.

8. 2023

   ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award

   In 2023, her 1998 paper with Kevin Knight, "Generation that Exploits Corpus-Based Statistical Knowledge", wins the ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award, shared with Hinrich Schütze's 1998 paper on word sense discrimination. The winners are announced at ACL 2023 in July 2023.