Dr. Lisa N. Michaud
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Summer 2013
Office Hours
any day: by appointment
9:30-1:30
Fall 2013 Courses
MY RESEARCH
My research interests are focused along two paths:
- Computational Linguistics, also called Natural Language Processing, has to do with enabling computers to process and produce the kinds of natural language utterances you and I use on a daily basis, as opposed to interacting with us only through the restricted, artificial languages we have designed for programming.
- User Modeling is the practice of designing systems that track their users' actions, creating a model of the user's skills, knowledge, intents, or beliefs.
These areas intersect in my work with the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems to aid classroom instruction, particularly in the field of Second Language Acquisition. These systems are also called Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems. My dissertation work focused on the ICICLE project at the University of Delaware. ICICLE stands for Interactive Computer Identification and Correction of Language Errors. The idea behind the project is the desire to enable a computer program to examine the writing of a student and help him or her fix the grammatical errors in it.
My current projects include:
- The Evaluation of Learner-Written Translations
I am working on adapting machine translation metrics to the evaluation of human learner-written translations. This is a continuation of my career-long interest in supporting the language acquisition process and providing useful feedback to language learners in a tutorial context.
Part of this work will hopefully support a new version of The King Alfred system , a collaboration with Anglo-Saxonist Dr. Michael Drout at Wheaton College. King Alfred is a CALL system for students learning Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon). This system aids students in their translation practice by providing both hints and a "scratch pad" for noting down information as they decode the original sentence.
- FLEX, an updated Word Frequency Lexicon
That's a working name. Based on the Google Books n-gram corpus, this is a collaborative effort with cogntive psychologist Dr. Raymond Shaw here at Merrimack.
- InfoMap and Weave
I have entered into a collaboration with Dr. Georges Grinstein's Institute for Visualization and Perception Research at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in order to empower the Weave visualization system to incorporate textual data, and to help the InfoMap display the results of intelligent text-based queries in a graphical format.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Michaud, Lisa N. and Patricia Ann McCoy (2013). Applying Machine Translation Metrics to Student-Written Translations. In Proceedgins of the 8th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, a workshop of the Annual Meeting of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), June, Atlanta, Georgia.
Michaud, Lisa N. (2012). AND, OR, NOT: Teaching Logic in CS0. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges 27(6), June 2012, 99-104.
Michaud, Lisa N. (2010). Learning Data Structures through Text Adventure Games. Journal of Computing Science in Colleges 25(6), June 2010, 243-244.
Michaud, Lisa N. (2008). King Alfred: A Translation Environment for Learners of Anglo-Saxon English. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, a workshop of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT), June 15-20, Columbus, Ohio, 19-26.
Michaud, Lisa N. and Kathleen F. McCoy (2006). An Interlanguage approach to parsing the writing of deaf students. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED), 16, 65-97.
Michaud, Lisa N., Kathleen F. McCoy, and Rashida Z. Davis (2005). A User Language Model for Disambiguating Natural Language Parses: Design and Evaluation. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Special Issue on Language-Based Interaction, 15(1): 55-84.
Michaud, Lisa N. and Kathleen F. McCoy (2004). Empirical Derivation of a Sequence of User Stereotypes. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 14(4): 317-350.