|
 |
Eleni Miltsakaki
Lecturer
|
Education
1988: B.A., English and American Language and Literature,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
1991: M.A., Applied Linguistics, University of Essex
2003: Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
Areas of Expertise
Advanced learning technologies
Language understanding and production
Discourse
Professional Biography
Prior to receiving her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the
University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Miltsakaki had a ten-year career in
second/foreign language education. As a director of studies in foreign language
schools in Athens, Greece, Dr. Miltsakaki worked extensively on curriculum
development and teacher training. During this time, she focused on cognitive
aspects of learning and the development of learner-centered methodologies for
the teaching of language fluency.
Dr. Miltsakaki’s dissertation was in the area of
computational linguistics, with a special emphasis on understanding aspects of
coherence in discourse. As a research associate with the natural language
processing group of Educational Testing Services, Dr. Miltsakaki work focused
on automating the evaluation of coherence in student essays for automated
essay-scoring systems. Upon receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Miltsakaki worked at the
Institute of Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) at the University of
Pennsylvania; her work there focused on improving models of discourse coherence
with an emphasis on the role and use of discourse connectives. As a research
associate at IRCS, she co-supervised the development of the Penn Discourse
Treebank, a large-scale annotation of discourse connectives.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Miltsakaki’s work has focused on natural language
understanding and natural language production. Her work has a strong
interdisciplinary component cutting across linguistics, psychology, and
computer science. Her major publications are in the areas of anaphora resolution,
discourse parsing, and educational technologies. Her current research interests
are in advanced learning technologies with a special focus on the unique role
that technological advances can play in building on core competencies of
educational institutions. She is particularly interested in the learning
benefits of smart student portfolios.
Selected Publications
Miltsakaki, E. (In press). Not all subjects are born equal:
A look at complex sentence structure. In Edward Gibson & Neal Perlmutter,
(Eds.), The Processing and Acquisition of Reference. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Miltsakaki, E., Prasad, R., Joshi, A., & Webber, B.
(2004). The Penn Discourse Treebank. In 4th International Conference on
Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004), Lisbon.
Miltsakaki, E., & and Kukich, K. (2004). Evaluation of
text coherence for electronic essay scoring systems. Natural Language
Engineering, 10(1).
Forbes, K., Miltsakaki, E., Prasad, R., Sarkar, A., Joshi,
A., & Webber, B. (2003). D-LTAG system: Discourse parsing with a
lexicalized tree adjoining grammar. Journal of Logic, Language and Information,
12(3), 2003.
Miltsakaki, E. (2002). Towards an aposynthesis of topic
continuity and intra-sentential anaphora. Computational Linguistics,
28(3):319–355.
Miltsakaki, E., & Kukich, K. (2000). The role of
Centering theory’s rough shift in the teaching and evaluation of writing skills.
In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL 2000), Hong Kong, 408–415.
|
