I am a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), working with Prof. Matt Huenerfauth, my thesis advisor. My research interests include natural language processing (NLP), in particular readability, text comprehension and text simplification.

My thesis research combines NLP and machine learning techniques to build and evaluate an automatic text readability assessment tool, with special focus on readers with intellectual disabilities. 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.

Before entering CUNY, I obtained an M.A. in Computer Science from Brooklyn College in May 2005 and an M.A. in German Literature from the Department of Germanic Lanugages and Literatures at Ohio State University in March 2001.

Publications

• Matt Huenerfauth, Lijun Feng, and Noémie Elhadad.
  Comparing Evaluation Techniques for Text Readability Software for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities. [view] [download pdf]
  In Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2009), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA 
  
  
• Lijun Feng, Noémie Elhadad, and Matt Huenerfauth.
  Cognitively Motivated Features for Readability Assessment. [pdf]
  In Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009), Athens, Greece.
  
  
• Lijun Feng.
  Automatic Readability Assessment for People with Intellectual Disabilities. [pdf]
  In 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2008), Doctoral Consortium. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
  
  

Thesis Work

• Thesis Proposal

  Automatic Readability Assessment: At the Intersection of Discourse and Memory. [pdf]
  CUNY, Oct. 29, 2009
  

• Technical Report
  

  Text Simplification: A Survey. [pdf] [slides]
  CUNY, March 27, 2008
  

Contact

Send me an email