I joined the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University since November 2010, working as a post-doctoral research scientist with Noemie Elhadad on emotion detection and classification in transcripts from patient support group meetings. My research interests lie in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning applications. I've done extensive work on text categorization, sentiment analysis and classification, automatic readability assessment, text comprehension and text simplification. I completed my Ph.D. at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in Fall 2010, where I worked with Matt Huenerfauth on automatic readability assessment. My thesis research combines NLP and machine learning techniques to build and evaluate an automatic text readability assessment tool, both for general audience, and adult readers with intellectual disabilities in particular. In addition to well studied lexical and syntactic features, my research pays special attention to local and global semantic text properties at various discourse levels that capture and reflect important comprehension processes crucial for successful text understanding. For high level details, see abstract of my thesis. Before entering CUNY, I obtained an M.A. in Computer Science from Brooklyn College in May 2005. Publications
Thesis Work
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