Research Interests

Summarization, particularly multi-document and multi-lingual summarization, Machine Translation, Cross-lingual Information Access and Retrieval

Education

2000 – May 2005 Doctor Of Philosophy, Computer Science

Columbia University, Computer Science Department, Natural Language Processing Group.

Thesis: Identifying Similarity in Text: Multilingual Analysis for Summarization

Cumulative GPA: 3.951 on a 4.0 scale.

1997 – May 2000 Master of Science, Computer Science

Columbia University, New York, New York

1992 – May 1997 Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering

Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

Magna Cum Laude B.S. Electrical Engineering, May 1997.

Magna Cum Laude B.S. Computer Science, May 1997.

Liberal Arts honors program.

Computer Science Major GPA: 3.805 on a 4.0 scale.

Electrical Engineering Major GPA: 3.659 on a 4.0 scale.

Math Minor GPA: 3.720 on a 4.0 scale.

Japanese Minor GPA: 4.000 on a 4.0 scale.

Academic and Work Experience

2008.08 – A9/Amazon.com

Software Engineer – Search Relevance.

2006 – 2008.08 National Institute of Informatics

Project researcher with the National Test Collection for Information Retrieval (NTCIR) project, working in multi-lingual summarization, opinion analysis, and information retrieval.

1997 – 2005 Columbia University, New York, New York

Funded Graduated Research Assistant on the National Science Foundation Grant "Automatic Identification of Significant Topics in Domain-independent Full Text Documents". Implemented LinkIT, a software tool for identifying significant topics using linguistics techniques, developed methods to analyze performance of an application of the above to an Information Retrieval task. Implemented software for automatic similarity detection between passages in multiple documents in multiple languages for summarization applications under the TIDES program.

Summer 2001 Baruch College

Instructor for Baruch College Continuing and Professional Studies ZITS 3005 Java II Server-side Java.

Summer 2001 Columbia University

Instructor for Columbia University COMS W1007-1 Object-oriented programming and design in Java.

Spring 2001 Baruch College

Instructor for Baruch College Continuing and Professional Studies ZITS 3003 Java I Introduction to Java Programming.

Spring 2000 Columbia University

Teaching Assistant for Columbia University COMS W4771-1 Machine Learning.

Fall 1999 Columbia University

Teaching Assistant for Columbia University COMS W4705-1 Natural Language Processing.

1999 – 1999 IBM Tokyo Research Lab

Summer internship through the NSF “Summer in Japan” researcher exchange program at IBM Japan's Chuo Rinkan facility. Researched automatic methods for customer trouble ticket routing and categorization.

1995 – 1997 Southern Methodist University

Southern Methodist University, Information Technology Services, Dallas, Texas

Junior network engineer; maintained campus wide ethernet network.

1996 – 1996 NTT Yokosuka Communications Research Lab

Summer internship at NTT's Yokosuka facility. Research on determining word similarity using specialized parallel hardware.

1992 – 1992

Summer internship at Wang Inc., Lowell, Massachusetts. Performed system maintenance on the VAX operating system.

Human Languages

English – Native speaker.
Japanese – Three years at Southern Methodist University, four years at Columbia University. Business level fluency.
German – Four years at West Windsor Plainsboro High School.

Computer Languages and Experience

Perl, Java, C, C++, PHP, a variety of other special-purpose languages, extensive experience with XML processing, XSLT, MySQL, PostgreSQL databases in web applications, GUI development in Java Swing, etc.

Professional Activities

Recipient of a Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences 2006 “Young Researcher” Grant for a two-year term to study multilingual, multicultural perspectives in summarization across Japanese, Chinese, and English documents.
Co-organizer of the NTCIR6 Opinion Analysis Pilot Task
Member of the NTCIR6 Planning Committee
Member of the Information Explosion World News Group
Member of the Association of Computational Linguistics

Publications

David Kirk Evans, Lun-Wei Ku, Yohei Seki, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Noriko Kando, “Opinion Analysis across languges: An Overview of and Observations from the NTCIR6 Opinion Analysis Pilot Task”, Third International Cross-Lingual Information Processing workshop, Camogli (Genova), Italy, July 7-10, 2007.
Yohei Seki, David Kirk Evans, Lun-Wei Ku, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Noriko Kando, Chin-Yew Lin, “Overview of the Opinion Analysis Pilot Task at NTCIR-6”, Sixth NTCIR Workshop Meeting on Evaluation of Information Access Technologies, Tokyo, Japan, May 16-18, 2007.
David Kirk Evans, “A low-resources approach to Opinion Analysis: Machine Learning and Simple Approaches”, Sixth NTCIR Workshop Meeting on Evaluation of Information Access Technologies, Tokyo, Japan, May 16-18, 2007.
David Kirk Evans, Noriko Kando, “Multi-lingual Opinion Analysis Applied to World News: A Case Study”, 13th Annual Meeting of the Natural Language Processing Society, Ryukoku University, Seta, Japan, March 22nd, 2007.
David Kirk Evans, "The Future of Multilingual Summarization: Beyond Sentence Extraction", New Directions in Multilingual Information Access 2006 SIGIR Workshop, Seattle, WA, August 10th, 2006.
David Kirk Evans, "NII at the 2006 Multilingual Summarization Evaluation", Multilingual Summarization Evaluation 2006 held in conjunction with the COLING-ACL 2006 Workshop "Task-focused Summarization and Question Answering", Sydney, Australia, July 23^rd, 2006.
Advaith Siddharthan, David Kirk Evans, "Columbia University at MSE2005", 2005 Multilingual Summarization Evaluation Workshop, Ann Arbor, MI, June 29th 2005.
David Kirk Evans, Kathleen McKeown, "Identifying Similarities and Differences Across English and Arabic News", International Conference on Intelligence Analysis, McLean, VA, May 2005.
David Kirk Evans, Kathleen McKeown, Judith L. Klavans, "Similarity-based Multilingual Multi-Document Summarization", Technical Report CUCS-014-05, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, Apr 2005.
Ani Nenkova, Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, David Evans, Andrew Hazen Schlaikjer, Advaith Siddarthan, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Kathleen McKeown, Becky Passonneau, "Columbia University at DUC 2004", Document Understanding Conference (DUC), Boston, MA, May 2004.
David Evans, Judith L. Klavans, Kathleen R. McKeown, "Columbia Newsblaster: Multilingual News Summarization on the Web", Human Language Technology (HLT), Boston, MA, May 2004.
David Kirk Evans, Judith L. Klavans, "A Platform for Multilingual News Summarization", Technical Report, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, May 2003.
Kathleen McKeown, Regina Barzilay, Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, David Evans, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Judith Klavans, Ani Nenkova, Barry Schiffman, "The Columbia Multi-Document Summarizer for DUC 2002", Second Document Understanding Conference (DUC), Philadelphia, PA, Jun 2002.
Kathleen R. McKeown, Regina Barzilay, David Evans, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Judith Klavans, Ani Nenkova, Carl Sable, Barry Schiffman, "Tracking and Summarizing News on a Daily Basis with Columbia's Newsblaster", Human Language Technology Conference, Mar 2002.
Kathy McKeown, Regina Barzilay, David Evans, Vasilis Hatzivassiloglou, Mn-Yen Kan, Barry Schiffman, Simone Teufel, "Columbia Multi-document Summarization: Approach and Evaluation", Document Understanding Conference 2001 (DUC 01), Sep 2001.
Nina Wacholder, David Evans, Judith Klavans, "Automatic Identification and Organization of Index Terms For Interactive Browsing", Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Roanoke, VA,, Jun 2001.
Judith Klavans, Nina Wacholder, David Evans, "Evaluation of Computational Linguistic Techniques for Identifying Significant Topics for Browsing Applications", Second InternationaConference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2000), Athens, Greece, Jun 2000.
Nina Wacholder, Judith Klavans, David Evans, "Evaluation of Automatically Identified Index Terms for Browsing Electronic Documents", ANLP-NAACL 2000, pp. 302-308, Seattle, WA, May 2000.
David Evans, Judith Klavans, Nina Wacholder, "Document Processing with LinkIT", RIAO 2000, Recherche d'Informations Assistee par Ordinateur, Paris, France, Apr 2000.

References

Dr. Noriko Kando

Professor of Software Engineering Research, Software Research Division

National Institute of Informatics (NII)

Rm.1507, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, JAPAN

Telephone: +81-3-4212-2529 Fax: +81-3-3556-1916, E-Mail: Noriko.Kando@nii.ac.jp

Dr. Judith L. Klavans

Director of Research, Center for Advanced Study of Language

College of Information Studies, Rm. 4117M Hornbake, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-4345

Telephone: 301-405-2033, E-Mail: jklavans@umd.edu

Dr. Kathleen McKeown

Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, New York, 10027

Telephone: 212-939-7118, E-Mail: kathy@cs.columbia.edu

Extracurricular activities

Recording Secretary of Tau Beta Pi TX I chapter (1996-1997 academic year)
Secretary of IEEE Student Chapter at SMU (1994-1995 academic year)
Vice President of Tau Beta Pi TX I chapter (1994-1995 academic year)
President of Tau Beta Pi, TX I chapter (1993-1994 academic year)
Organized and played in the IEEE Intramural Basketball team (1993-1994 academic year)

Awards

SMU Honor Roll Fall 1992 to Spring 1997
Tatum Award for Outstanding EE Student (1997)
University Scholar (1992-1996)
Lindsey J. Embrey Scholarship (1992-1996)
Tau Beta Pi "Most Valuable Member" award (1994)
Golden Key Honor Society (1994)
Eta Kappa Nu (1994)