Ariadna Font Llitjós

aria@cs.cmu.edu

   

University address:            

Language Technologies Institute,

Carnegie Mellon University.  

3612 Newell Simon Hall.  5000 Forbes Ave.

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

+1 (412) 268-4083 

 

 

EDUCATION           

Carnegie Mellon University.   Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Master`s candidate in the Language Technologies Institute

Anticipated graduation: June 2001

 

University of Barcelona, University of Barcelona, Pompeu Fabra University

and Polytechnic University of Catalonia.   Barcelona, Spain

Doctoral candidate in the Program in Cognitive Science and Language

1997 to current

 

Pompeu Fabra University.   Barcelona, Spain

BA with Honors in Translation and Interpreting

Senior thesis: A bottom-up chart parser for PATR unification grammars in prolog (Completion with Honors). September 1992 to July 1996

 

EXPERIENCE          

Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University        

Research on how to improve speech synthesis (and recognition) of foreign proper names in American English with the hypothesis that origin class information may help to build better letter to sound rules for the speech synthesizer.(Master Thesis) Advisor: Alan Black.

                                   

Microsoft Research.    Seattle, WA, USA

Summer Intern. Worked with the NLP team in building the Spanish Generation Module for the general purpose, multilingual Machine Translation System (NLPWIN). Mentors: Steve Richardson, Carmen Lozano and Maite Melero.  Manager: Karen Jensen.

May-July 2000

 

Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Grammar writer for the JANUS (C-STAR) project. Worked on the Generation Grammar for Spanish to be added to the existing Interlingua Machine Translation System for English, German, French, Italian, Korean and Japanese on the travel domain. Advisors: Lori Levin and Alon Lavie.

October 1999-May 2000

 

Translation and Interpreting Faculty, Pompeu Fabra University    Barcelona

Teacher of the Graduate Program: Text Management for Professionals: Translation and Processing. February-July 1999

 

Institute for Applied Linguistics, Pompeu Fabra University  Barcelona

Graduate Fellow. Construction of a Constraint Grammar to allow morphological and syntactic disambiguation and parsing of the IULA Technical Corpus, within the project "scientific and technological terminology: formal and semantic information recognition, analysis and retrieval" (PB 96 - 0293). Directed by Toni Badia.

September 1997-July 1999

 

Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, University of Stuttgart Germany

Research Assistant. Extraction of subcategorization patterns of English verbs from the British National Corpus with the tool Xkwic. Directed by Ulrich Heid. April-August 1997       

 

Institute for Applied Linguistics, Pompeu Fabra University  Barcelona

Graduate Fellow. Wrote an Analysis Grammar for a transfer, LFG-based Machine Translation System (LEKTA), within the European project LS-GRAM (Large Scale Grammars for EC Languages) corresponding to the European Union subvention LRE-61029. Directed by Toni Badia.

September 1996-March 1997

 

Information Systems Department   Buenos Aires, Argentina

Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Facultad Regional de Buenos Aires

Research and teaching on Natural Language Processing and Grammars to 4th and last year Information Systems Engineering students.

August-September1995

 

SKILLS                     

Languages: fluent in Catalan, Spanish and English, proficient in German and French, written and spoken understanding of Italian and Portuguese

Programming languages: C++, Perl, Lisp and Prolog

Operating Systems: UNIX, DOS and Windows NT/9x/2000

Software: MS Tools,

 

 HONORS                 

``La Caixa`` Fellowship for 1999-2000 and 2000-2001, Spain

 

 

Publications      

Construction of a Spanish Generation module in the framework of a General-Purpose, Multilingual Natural Language Processing System. Maite Melero and Ariadna Font. 7th International Symposium on Social Communication, Santiago de Cuba, January 2001

 

Lessons Learned from a Task-Based Evaluation of Speech-to-Speech MT. Lori Levin, Boris Bartlog, Ariadna Font Llitjos, Donna Gates, Alon Lavie, Dorcas Wallace, Taro Watanabe and Monika Woszczyna. LREC 2000, Athens, pages 721-724.

 

Implementation and coverage of an Analysis Grammar for Catalan within the Machine Translation System LEKTA. 6th International Symposium on Social Communication, Santiago de Cuba, January 1998

 

Natural Language Processing and Toy Grammars. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional de Buenos Aires. Information Systems Department. September 1995

 

 

Seminars and Summer Schools

 

Graduate Seminar on Information Theory, John Lafferty. Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

September-December 2000

 

Seminar on Advanced Topics in Statistical NLP, John Lafferty. Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

January-May 2000                  

 

6th European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication: ROBUSTNESS. Real life applications in language and speech. Barcelona. July 13-24 1998   

           

1st International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. (LREC) Translation and Interpreting Department, University of Granada, Spain. May 28-30 1998

           

Computational Linguistics Seminar: Word Order and Formal Treatment of Prepositions. Institute for Applied Linguistics, Barcelona (Toni Badia, Enric Vallduví, Josep M. Fontana, Louise McNally, Àlex Alsina).

September 1997-July 1998

 

Seminar in Semantics by Dr. Louise McNally. IULA, UPF, Barcelona. January-March 1996

           

Computational Linguistics Seminar: Underspecification as alternative. Corpus Semantics. IULA, UPF, Barcelona.

September 1996-March 1997