Wayne Ward

Also published as: W. Ward, Wayne H. Ward


2024

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My Science Tutor (MyST)–a Large Corpus of Children’s Conversational Speech
Sameer Pradhan | Ronald A. Cole | Wayne H. Ward
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

This article describes the [corpus-name] corpus developed as part of the [project-name] project. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the largest collections of children’s conversational speech that is freely available for non-commercial use under the creative commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). It comprises approximately 400 hours of speech, spanning some 230K utterances spread across about 10,500 virtual tutor sessions. Roughly 1,300 third, fourth and fifth grade students contributed to this corpus. The current release contains roughly 100K transcribed utterances. It is our hope that the corpus can be used to improve automatic speech recognition models and algorithms. We report the word error rate achieved on the test set using a model trained on the training and development portion of the corpus. The git repository of the corpus contains the complete training and evaluation setup in order to facilitate a fair and consistent evaluation. It is our hope that this corpus will contribute to the creation and evaluation of conversational AI agents having a better understanding of children’s speech, potentially opening doors to novel, effective, learning and therapeutic interventions.

2016

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My Science Tutor—Learning Science with a Conversational Virtual Tutor
Sameer Pradhan | Ron Cole | Wayne Ward
Proceedings of ACL-2016 System Demonstrations

2012

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Question Ranking and Selection in Tutorial Dialogues
Lee Becker | Martha Palmer | Sarel van Vuuren | Wayne Ward
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP

2011

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DISCUSS: A dialogue move taxonomy layered over semantic representations
Lee Becker | Wayne Ward | Sarel van Vuuren | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2011)

2008

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Annotating Students’ Understanding of Science Concepts
Rodney D. Nielsen | Wayne Ward | James Martin | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

This paper summarizes the annotation of fine-grained entailment relationships in the context of student answers to science assessment questions. We annotated a corpus of 15,357 answer pairs with 145,911 fine-grained entailment relationships. We provide the rationale for such fine-grained analysis and discuss its perceived benefits to an Intelligent Tutoring System. The corpus also has potential applications in other areas, such as question answering and multi-document summarization. Annotators achieved 86.2% inter-annotator agreement (Kappa=0.728, corresponding to substantial agreement) annotating the fine-grained facets of reference answers with regard to understanding expressed in student answers and labeling from one of five possible detailed relationship categories. The corpus described in this paper, which is the only one providing such detailed entailment annotations, is available as a public resource for the research community. The corpus is expected to enable application development, not only for intelligent tutoring systems, but also for general textual entailment applications, that is currently not practical.

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Towards Robust Semantic Role Labeling
Sameer S. Pradhan | Wayne Ward | James H. Martin
Computational Linguistics, Volume 34, Number 2, June 2008 - Special Issue on Semantic Role Labeling

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Classification Errors in a Domain-Independent Assessment System
Rodney D. Nielsen | Wayne Ward | James H. Martin
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

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Extracting a Representation from Text for Semantic Analysis
Rodney D. Nielsen | Wayne Ward | James H. Martin | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, Short Papers

2007

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A Corpus of Fine-Grained Entailment Relations
Rodney D. Nielsen | Wayne Ward
Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing

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Posterior Probability Based Confidence Measures Applied to a Children’s Speech Reading Tracking System
Daniel Bolanos | Wayne H. Ward
Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2007)

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Towards Robust Semantic Role Labeling
Sameer Pradhan | Wayne Ward | James Martin
Human Language Technologies 2007: The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; Proceedings of the Main Conference

2005

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Semantic Role Chunking Combining Complementary Syntactic Views
Sameer Pradhan | Kadri Hacioglu | Wayne Ward | James H. Martin | Daniel Jurafsky
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2005)

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Semantic Role Labeling Using Different Syntactic Views
Sameer Pradhan | Wayne Ward | Kadri Hacioglu | James Martin | Daniel Jurafsky
Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’05)

2004

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Semantic Role Labeling by Tagging Syntactic Chunks
Kadri Hacioglu | Sameer Pradhan | Wayne Ward | James H. Martin | Daniel Jurafsky
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2004) at HLT-NAACL 2004

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Shallow Semantic Parsing using Support Vector Machines
Sameer S. Pradhan | Wayne H. Ward | Kadri Hacioglu | James H. Martin | Dan Jurafsky
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: HLT-NAACL 2004

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Parsing Arguments of Nominalizations in English and Chinese
Sameer Pradhan | Honglin Sun | Wayne Ward | James H. Martin | Daniel Jurafsky
Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2004: Short Papers

2003

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Target Word Detection and Semantic Role Chunking using Support Vector Machines
Kadri Hacioglu | Wayne Ward
Companion Volume of the Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2003 - Short Papers

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Question Classification with Support Vector Machines and Error Correcting Codes
Kadri Hacioglu | Wayne Ward
Companion Volume of the Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2003 - Short Papers

2001

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On Combining Language Models: Oracle Approach
Kadri Hacioglu | Wayne Ward
Proceedings of the First International Conference on Human Language Technology Research

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University of Colorado Dialogue Systems for Travel and Navigation
B. Pellom | W. Ward | J. Hansen | R. Cole | K. Hacioglu | J. Zhang | X. Yu | S. Pradhan
Proceedings of the First International Conference on Human Language Technology Research

1995

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Concept-Based Parsing For Speech Translation
L. J. Mayfield | M. Gavalda | Y-H. Seo | B. Suhm | Wayne Ward | A. Waibel
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages

1994

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Recent Improvements in the CMU Spoken Language Understanding System
Wayne Ward | Sunil Issar
Human Language Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop held at Plainsboro, New Jersey, March 8-11, 1994

1993

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Recent Advances in Janus: A Speech Translation System
M. Woszczyna | N. Coccaro | A. Eisele | A. Lavie | A. McNair | T. Polzin | I. Rogina | C. P. Rose | T. Sloboda | M. Tomita | J. Tsutsumi | N. Aoki-Waibel | A. Waibel | W. Ward
Human Language Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Plainsboro, New Jersey, March 21-24, 1993

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Recent Advances in JANUS: A Speech Translation System
M. Woszczyna | N. Coccaro | A. Eisele | A. Lavie | A. McNair | T. Polzin | I. Rogina | C. P. Rose | T. Sloboda | M. Tomita | J. Tsutsumi | N. Aoki-Waibel | A. Waibel | Wayne Ward
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages

1992

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Session 2: Spoken Language Systems II
Wayne Ward
Speech and Natural Language: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Harriman, New York, February 23-26, 1992

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Speech Understanding in Open Tasks
Wayne Ward | Sunil Issar | Xuedong Huang | Hsiao-Wuen Hon | Mei-Yuh Hwang | Sheryl Young | Mike Matessa | Fu-Hua Liu | Richard Stern
Speech and Natural Language: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Harriman, New York, February 23-26, 1992

1991

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Evaluation of the CMU ATIS System
Wayne Ward
Speech and Natural Language: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Pacific Grove, California, February 19-22, 1991

1990

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Session 1: Spoken Language Systems I
Wayne Ward
Speech and Natural Language: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania, June 24-27,1990

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The CMU Air Travel Information Service: Understanding Spontaneous Speech
Wayne Ward
Speech and Natural Language: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania, June 24-27,1990

1989

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Understanding Spontaneous Speech
Wayne Ward
Speech and Natural Language: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 21-23, 1989

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Modelling Non-verbal Sounds for Speech Recognition
Wayne Ward
Speech and Natural Language: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, October 15-18, 1989