Research Interests
My research focuses on applications of natural language processing and machine learning, particularly to problems in educational assessment.
Distinctions
Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER), Carnegie Mellon University, 2007-2011.
Graduate Research Fellowship, National Science Foundation, 2007-2010.
Siebel Scholarship, 2007.
Reilly Scholarship, University of Notre Dame, 2005.
Projects
Automatic Factual Question Generation from Text (2008-2011)
Predicting Impact in Scientific Literature (2010-2011)
The ARKref Noun Phrase Coreference Resolution Tool (2009-2010)
Tree edit models for semantic tasks such as recognizing textual entailment (2009)
RAVINE (2008-2010)
REAP (2005-2008)
Readability Prediction (2005-2008)
Papers
2011
M. Heilman. 2011. Automatic Factual Question Generation from Text. Ph.D. Dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University. CMU-LTI-11-004. [PDF]
D. Yogatama, M. Heilman, B. O'Connor, C. Dyer, B. R. Routledge, and N. A. Smith. 2010. Predicting a Scientific Community's Response to an Article. In Proc. of EMNLP. [PDF]
K. Gimpel, N. Schneider, B. O'Connor, D. Das, D. Mills, J. Eisenstein, M. Heilman, D. Yogatama, J. Flanigan, and N. A. Smith. 2011. Part-of-Speech Tagging for Twitter: Annotation, Features, and Experiments. In Proc. of ACL, companion volume. [PDF]
D. Yogatama, M. Heilman, B. O'Connor, C. Dyer , B. R. Routledge, and N. A. Smith. 2011. Predicting Responses and Discovering Social Factors in Scientific Literature. Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report CMU-LTI-11-015. [PDF]
2010
M. Heilman and N. A. Smith. 2010. Tree Edit Models for Recognizing Textual Entailments, Paraphrases, and Answers to Questions.
In Proc. of NAACL/HLT. [PDF]
[appendix and errata]
[PDF slides]
M. Heilman and N. A. Smith. 2010. Good Question! Statistical Ranking for Question Generation.
In Proc. of NAACL/HLT. [PDF]
[errata]
[PDF slides]
M. Heilman and N. A. Smith. 2010. Rating Computer-Generated Questions with Mechanical Turk. In Proc. of the NAACL/HLT workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data With Amazon's Mechanical Turk. [PDF]
M. Heilman and N. A. Smith. 2010. Extracting Simplified Statements for Factual Question Generation.
In Proc. of the 3rd Workshop on Question Generation. [PDF]
[PPT slides]
N. Schneider, R. Hwa, P. Gianfortoni, D. Das, M. Heilman, A. W. Black, F. L. Crabbe, and N. A. Smith. 2010. Visualizing Topical Quotations Over Time to Understand News Discourse. Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report CMU-LTI-10-013. [PDF]
M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, M. Eskenazi, A. Juffs, L. Wilson. 2010. Personalization of Reading Passages Improves Vocabulary Acquisition. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Vol. 20 (1). [errata]
2009
M. Heilman and N. A. Smith. 2009. Ranking automatically generated questions as a shared task. In Proc. of the 2nd Workshop on Question Generation. [PDF]
M. Heilman and N. A. Smith. 2009.
Question Generation via Overgenerating Transformations and Ranking.
Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report CMU-LTI-09-013.
[PDF]
[errata]
2008
N. A. Smith, M. Heilman, and R. Hwa. 2008. Question generation as a competitive undergraduate course project. In Proc. of the Workshop on the Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge. [PDF]
A. Kulkarni, M. Heilman, M. Eskenazi, and J. Callan. 2008. Word Sense Disambiguation for Vocabulary Learning. In Proc. of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. [PDF]
M. Heilman and M. Eskenazi. 2008. Self-assessment in vocabulary tutoring. In Proc. of the Young Researcher's Track. 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. [PDF]
C. Feeney and M. Heilman. 2008. Automatically generating and validating reading-check questions. In Proc. of the Young Researcher's Track. 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. [PDF]
J. Pino, M. Heilman, and M. Eskenazi. 2008. A selection strategy to improve cloze question quality. In Proc. of the Workshop on Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Domains. 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring System [PDF]
M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, and M. Eskenazi. 2008. An analysis of statistical models and features for reading difficulty prediction. In Proc. of The 3rd Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications. [PDF]
M. Heilman, L. Zhao, J. Pino, and M. Eskenazi. 2008. Retrieval of reading materials for vocabulary and reading practice. In Proc. of the 3rd Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications. [PDF]
2007
M. Heilman and M. Eskenazi. 2007. Application of automatic thesaurus extraction for computer generation of vocabulary questions. In Proc. of the SLaTE Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education. [PDF]
M. Heilman, A. Juffs, and M. Eskenazi. 2007.
Choosing reading passages for vocabulary learning by topic to increase intrinsic motivation.
In Proc. of AIED.
[PDF]
[errata]
M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, J. Callan, and M. Eskenazi. 2007. Combining lexical and grammatical features to improve readability measures for first and second language texts. In Proc. NAACL-HLT. [PDF]
2006
M. Heilman, K. Collins-Thompson, J. Callan, and M. Eskenazi. 2006. Classroom success of an intelligent tutoring system for lexical practice and reading comprehension. In Proc. of the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. [PDF]
M. Heilman and M. Eskenazi. 2006. Language learning: Challenges for intelligent tutoring systems. In Proc. of the Workshop of Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Tutoring Systems. Eight International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. [PDF]
2005
K. M. Eberhard, M. Scheutz, and M. Heilman. 2005. An empirical and computational test of linguistic relativity. In Proc. of the Cognitive Science Society Conference.