Radu Soricut

I am currently a Research Scientist at Language Weaver, Inc., in Marina del Rey, California.

Graduate Research Assistant	Ph.D. Candidate
Information Sciences Institute	Department of Computer Science
University of Southern California	University of Southern California
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6601

(310) 448-8732
(310) 822-0751

Research Interests

My long-term research goal is to make computers achieve human levels of performance when using natural language. More precisely, I am interested in developing theories and algorithms that can lead to computer software capable of producing meaningful sentences and structured, coherent text from bits and pieces of textual information. These capabilities, deployed in applications such as translation, summarization, and question answering, could significantly increase our ability to assimilate and disseminate information. I have got my Ph.D. in August 2006 with a dissertation entitled "Natural Language Generation using an Information-Slim Representation", under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Marcu. In the Summer of 2003 I worked with Eric Brill in the Machine Learning and Applied Statistics group at Microsoft Research on question answering and automatic evaluation.

Curriculum Vitae

Dissertation

Radu Soricut. 2006. Natural Language Generation using an Information-Slim Representation. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southern California, Department of Computer Science.

Selected Publications

Radu Soricut and Eric Brill. 2006. Automatic Question Answering Using the Web: Beyond the Factoid. Journal of Information Retrieval - Special Issue on Web Information Retrieval, 9:191-206.

Radu Soricut and Daniel Marcu. 2006. Stochastic Language Generation Using WIDL-expressions and its Application in Machine Translation and Summarization. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (ACL-2006). July 17-21, Sidney, Australia.

Radu Soricut and Daniel Marcu. 2005. Towards Developing Generation Algorithms for Text-to-Text Applications. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (ACL-2005), June 25-30, Ann Arbor, MI.

Radu Soricut and Daniel Marcu. 2003. Sentence Level Discourse Parsing using Syntactic and Lexical Information. Proceedings of the Human Language Technology and North American Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (HLT/NAACL-2003). May 27-June 1, Edmonton, Canada.

Software

SPADE (Sentence-level PArsing for DiscoursE)

Mass Media

From factoids to facts (The Economist)

Publication List

Journals

Radu Soricut and Eric Brill. 2006. Automatic Question Answering Using the Web: Beyond the Factoid. Journal of Information Retrieval - Special Issue on Web Information Retrieval, 9:191-206.

Conferences

Radu Soricut and Daniel Marcu. 2006. Stochastic Language Generation Using WIDL-expressions and its Application in Machine Translation and Summarization. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (ACL-2006). July 17-21, Sidney, Australia.

Radu Soricut and Daniel Marcu. 2006. Discourse Generation Using Utility-Trained Coherence Models. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (ACL-2006). Poster Session. July 17-21, Sidney, Australia.

Radu Soricut. 2005. Natural Language Generation for Text-to-Text Applications Using an Information-Slim Representation. Proceedings of the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium. July 9-13, Pittsburgh, PA.

Radu Soricut and Daniel Marcu. 2005. Towards Developing Generation Algorithms for Text-to-Text Applications. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (ACL-2005). June 25-30, Ann Arbor, MI.

Radu Soricut and Eric Brill. 2004. A Unified Framework for Automatic Evaluation using N-gram Co-Occurrence Statistics. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (ACL-2004). July 22-25, Barcelona, Spain.

Radu Soricut and Eric Brill. 2004. Automatic Question Answering: Beyond the Factoid. Proceedings of the Human Language Technology and North American Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (HLT/NAACL-2004). May 2-5, Boston, MA.

Radu Soricut and Daniel Marcu. 2003. Sentence Level Discourse Parsing using Syntactic and Lexical Information. Proceedings of the Human Language Technology and North American Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (HLT/NAACL-2003). May 27-June 1, Edmonton, Canada.

Radu Soricut, Kevin Knight, and Daniel Marcu. 2002. Using a large monolingual corpus to improve translation accuracy. Proceedings of the Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA-2002). Tiburon, CA, October 8-12.

Hal Daume III, Abdessamad Echihabi, Daniel Marcu, Dragos Stefan Munteanu, and Radu Soricut. 2002. GLEANS: A Generator of Logical Extracts and Abstracts for Nice Summaries. Proceedings of the Document Understanding Conference (DUC-2002). Philadelphia, PA, July 11-12.

Radu Soricut. 1996. Ring-buffer Protocols in Process Algebra. Proceedings "Tendinte Actuale in Cibernetica si Filosofia Sttintei", National Conference of the Academy of Cybernetics "Stefan Odobleja". Baile Felix, Romania, October 1996.

Workshops

Teodor Rus, Robert Kooima, Radu Soricut, Dragos Stefan Munteanu, James Hunsaker. 1999. A Component-Based Language Processing Environment. Midwest Society for Programming Languages and Systems Workshop. Illinois Institute of Technology, September 1999.

Technical Reports

Jan A. Bergstra, Cornelius A. Middelburg, Radu Soricut. 1997. A Discrete Time Network Algebra for a Semantic Foundation of SDL. Research Report 98, International Institute for Software Technology, United Nations University , September 1997.

Last change: Oct. 2, 2006.