Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2003
• M.A., Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, 1994
• B.A., Economics, Delhi University, Delhi, 1991

Interests & Expertise

My primary research interest lies in discourse-level natural language interpretation and generation, using a combination of rule-driven and machine-learning techniques. I am particularly interested in biomedical and clinical text processing, for extracting deep inferences from texts, such as causal and contrastive relations between events and situations, and to identify the structure and semantics of discourse segments. I have developed discourse annotated corpora in both the open domain and the biomedical and clinical domains. Specific projects I have worked on include shallow discourse parsing, sentence planning for generation, anaphora generation, question generation from multi-sentential texts, attribution identification to separate facts from beliefs and opinions, and dialogue act tagging.

Recent Publications

Prasad, R., McRoy, S., Frid, N., Joshi, A., & Yu, H. (2011). The Biomedical Discourse Relation Bank. BMC BioInformatics, 12:188

Fan, J.-W., Prasad, R., Yabut, R., Loomis, R., Zisook, D., Mattison, J., & Huang, Y. (2011, October). Part-of-speech Tagging for Clinical Texts: Wall or Bridge Between Institutions? To appear in Proceedings of AMIA 35th Annual Symposium on Biomedical and Health Informatics "Improving Health: Informatics and IT Changing the World", Washington, DC.

Mannem, P., Prasad, R., & Joshi, A. (2010, June). Question Generation from Paragraphs at UPenn: QGSTEC System Description. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Question Generation (QG2010), Pittsburgh.

Prasad, R., Joshi, A., & Webber, B. (2010, May). Exploiting Scope for Shallow Discourse Parsing. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010), Valletta, Malta.

Lee, A., Prasad, R., Joshi, A., & Webber, B. (2008, July-August). Departures from Tree Structures in Discourse: Shared Arguments in the Penn Discourse Treebank. Proceedings of the Constraints in Discourse III Workshop, Potsdam, Germany.

Yu, H., Frid, N., McRoy, S., Prasad, R., Lee, A., & Joshi, A. (2008, June). A Pilot Annotation to Investigate Discourse Connectivity in Biomedical Text. Proceedings of the ACL:HLT 2008 BioNLP Workshop, Columbus, Ohio.

Prasad, R., Dinesh, N., Lee, A., Miltsakaki, E., Robaldo, L., Joshi, A., & Webber, B. (2008, May). The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Morocco.

Walker, M., Stent, A., Mairesse, F., & Prasad, R. (2007). Individual and Domain Adaptation in Sentence Planning for Dialogue. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 30, 413-456

Prasad, R., Dinesh, N., Lee, A., Joshi, A., & Webber, B. (2007). Attribution and its Annotation in the Penn Discourse TreeBank. Traitement Automatique des Langues, Special Issue on Computational Approaches to Document and Discourse, 47(2).

Higashinaka, R., Prasad, R., & Walker, M. (2006, July). Learning to Generate Naturalistic Utterances Using Reviews in Spoken Dialogue Systems. Proceedings of COLING/ACL, Sydney, Australia.

Miltsakaki, E., Dinesh, N., Prasad, R., Joshi, A., & Webber, B. (2005, December). Experiments on Sense Annotations and Sense Disambiguation of Discourse Connectives. Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT2005), Barcelona, Spain.

Prasad, R., Miltsakaki, E., Joshi, A., & Webber, B. (2004, July). Annotation and Data Mining of the Penn Discourse TreeBank. Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Discourse Annotation, Barcelona, Greece.

Forbes, K., Miltsakaki, E., Prasad, R., Sarkar, A., Joshi, A., & Webber, B. (2003). DLTAG System - Discourse Parsing with a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar. Journal of Logic, Language and Information, "Special Issue on Discourse and Information Structure", 12(3). Kluwer.

Prasad, R. (2003). Constraints on the Generation of Referring Expressions, with Special Reference to Hindi. PhD Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

Prasad, R., & Walker, M. (2002, July). Training a Dialogue Act Tagger for Human-Human and Human-Computer Travel Dialogues. Proceedings of the 3rd SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialog, Philadelphia, PA.

Prasad, R., & Strube, M. (2000). Discourse Salience and Pronoun Resolution in Hindi. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol 6.3, 189-208.