Our 2009 program was small. We had 5 interns during the Fall of 2009 and Spring of 2010. The interns worked with Professor Kalita and his graduate students.

2009-10 Interns

• Lauren Hinkle (Colorado College, Computer Science, Junior): Lauren is working on using machine learning techniques to develop optimal soft keyboard schemes for languages of India and other languages where people are unable to enter text and data in computers.
• Mark-Anthony Hutton (UCCS, Computer Science, Senior): Mark-Anthony worked on the problem of summarizing Twitter posts. He worked with a current graduate student, BeauX Sharifi. Beaux works for a local company called RTL Logic. Beaux was Mark-Anthony's industry mentor.
• Miguel Lezcano (UCCS, Computer Science, Senior): Miguel worked during Fall of 2009. He worked on developing a soft keyboard for a language from Northeast India.
• Grayson Scheirer (University of Colorado at Boulder, Linguistics major/Computer Science Minor, Senior): Grayson worked with Dr. Kalita. He helped write Dr. Kalita a large multi-university NSF grant on building coropora for three languages for Northeast India that are not widely studied: Assamese, Meitei and Khasi. Although the grant application was denied, Grayson earned valuable experience. He also worked on developing a POS tag set for these languages.
• Daryl Woodward (UCCS, Electrical Engineering, Junior): Daryl worked on the problem of recognition of named locational entities in Wikipedia documents. He worked with a former graduate student, Jeremy Witmer, who works at MITRE, Inc. Jeremy was Daryl's industry mentor.

Accomplishments

We submitted three papers to conferences. Of the three papers, two were accepted for conferences. One of the conferencdes is the prestigious NAACL-HTL conference to be held in LA in June 2010. We are hoping to submit at least one more paper before Spring 2010 term is over. Here are the two papers that were accepted.

• Sharifi, Beaux, Mark-Anthony Hutton, and Jugal Kalita. 2010. Summarizing Microblogs Automatically, Annual Conference of the National Association for Advancement of Computational Intelligence-Human Language Technology (NAACL-HLT), Los Angeles, June (35% acceptance rate).

• Sharifi, Beaux, Mark-Anthony Hutton and Jugal Kalita. 2010. Automatic Summarization of Twitter Topics, National Workshop on Design and Analysis of Algorithms, NWDAA ’10, Tezpur University, Assam, India.

Mark-Anthony Hutton traveled to Los Angeles to present the paper along with Beau Sharifi.