Pablo Duboue

Independent Researcher
Les Laboratoires Foulab
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
http://duboue.net

Bio:

I am an independent researcher. My work focuses on applied language
technology and natural language generation. I received a Licenciatura
en Computacion degree from Cordoba University (Argentina) in 1998 and
M.S., M.Phil and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Columbia
University in the City of New York in 2001, 2003 and 2005. I am
passionate about improving society through language technology and I
try to split my time between teaching, doing research and contributing
to free software projects. I have taught at Cordoba University,
Columbia University, Siglo21 University and worked for IBM TJ Watson
Research as a Research Staff Member, where I was one of the earliest
contributors to the DeepQA (Watson) system.

My most recent scientific work has been focused on applying NLG to
problems of practical interest: lexical choice on email thread
summarization (INLG'12) [1], describing multidimensional objects
(ENLG'13) [2], referring expressions with dbPedia (NAACL'12) [3]. I
have also taught a graduate-level seminar in Text Construction in 2011
(it included NLG, and the output stages of summarization and machine
translation) [4].

I have contributed to a number of NLG-related FLOSS projects and I
have a few of my own (including using some NLG concepts in PureData
[5] and PHP [6]).

In term of administrative duties, my most relevant experience includes
organizing the Debian Conference in New York City in 2010. The event
brought 350 developers from all over the world. I was involved in a
number of roles but my main contribution was heading the fundraising
team. I was also the Webmaster for HLT-NAACL'04.


Candidacy Statement:

All since my PhD years I have NLG close to my heart. I want to help
push the visibility issues identified and currently being adressed by
the current board to extend NLG beyond academic communities. I find
that NLG is not necessarily amenable to the pure Machine Learning
techniques that have taken over NLU. From that perspective, our
algorithmic / logical / grammatical tools which we have built,
cherished and shared all through these years might help us attract
more developer mindshare.

Given my diverse background spanning industrial corporate research to
startup R&D with a focus on using open source tools, my main mandate
will be developer outreach for NLG adoption. I would like to start a
campaign in the form of "NLG <3 Developers" with some exciting (basic)
challenges for newcommers. This can strenghten the participation in
our shared tasks at INLG. Moreover, the Python Conference will be held
here in Montreal next Spring, this could be a good opportunity to
organize some sprints in NLG-related python projects.

[1] http://duboue.net/pablo/papers/INLG2012duboue.pdf
[2] http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W13/W13-2123.pdf
[3] http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N12-1082
[4] http://wiki.duboue.net/index.php/2011_FaMAF_Intro_to_NLG
[5] http://wiki.duboue.net/index.php/NLG_for_PD
[6] https://github.com/DrDub/php-nlgen