Current
I am a fifth-year PhD student in the Linguistics Department at the University of Illinois - Urbana, Champaign.
I hold a teaching assistantship in the Computer Science Department for the class CS101, which is taught by Thomas Gambill.
Education
2007 M.A. Linguistics, University of Illinois - Urbana, Champaign
2003 B.S. Computer Science and Linguistics, University of Maryland - College Park
Publications
2008
Andrew Fister and Roxana Girju. May 10-11, 2008. Preliminary Investigation Toward an Automated Notetaking System. In the proceedings of The Fifth Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium, East Lansing, Michigan.
2007
Brandon Beamer, Suma Bhat, Brant Chee, Andrew Fister, Alla Rozovskaya, Roxana Girju. June 24-29, 2007. UIUC: A Knowledge-rich Approach to Identifying Semantic Relations between Nominals. In the proceedings of the Semantic Evaluation Workshop (SemEval 2007) in conjunction with ACL, Prague.
2006
Tao Tao, Su-Youn Yoon, Andrew Fister, Richard Sproat and ChengXiang Zhai. July 22-23, 2006. Unsupervised Named Entity Transliteration Using Temporal and Phonetic Correlation. EMNLP, Sydney, Australia.
2005
Richard Sproat, Dan Roth, ChengXiang Zhai, Elabbas Benmamoun, Andrew Fister, Nadia Karlinsky, Alex Klementiev, Chongwon Park, Vasin Punyakanok, Tao Tao, Su-youn Yoon. May 14-16, 2005. Reflex: named entity recognition and transliteration for 50 languages. MCLC.
2004
Michael L. Anderson, Andrew Fister, Bryant Lee, Luwito Tardia, and Danny Wang. 2004. On the types and frequency of meta-language in conversation. 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse.
Research Interests
My general area of interest is computational semantics. I like to think about what makes people able to interpret the utterances of others. I like to figure out what makes it so easy for humans to do, while it's so hard for computers.
More specifically I'm interested in discourse-level semantic analysis and forthcoming internet technologies that facilitate human communication. I've also created a tool for automatically creating a customized and scalable corpus based on RSS technology.
Currently, I'm working with Roxana Girju on a research project to study the linguistic structure of note-taking. I think it would be fun to make a computer program that can write notes for humans.
Previous
2008
2008 Teaching assistantship in the Linguistics Department for the class LING 307, which is taught by Roxana Girju.
2007-2008 Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship for the 2007-2008 academic year to study Arabic.
2008 Workshop(slides here) on corpus linguistics methods for the Linguistics Department, on 16 April.
2007
2007 Teaching Assistantship in the Linguistics Department for the classes LING402 and LING 307, which were taught by Roxana Girju.
2007 Research Assistantship at the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, developing a tool for querying a variety of annotated linguistic data for Kazuaki Maeda and Stephanie Strassel.
2007 I recently fixed bug 437684 in the Tomboy Notes open source note-taking program. The bug fix was included in the unstable release version 0.7.4.
2007 I fixed bug 409939 in the Tomboy Notes open source note-taking program. The bug fix was included in the unstable release version 0.7.1.
2007 Workshop(slides here) on corpus linguistics methods for the Linguistics Department, on 16 April.
2007 Teaching assistantship in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, for the class ECE448/CS440, taught by Stephen Levinson.
2006-2007 Research assistantship in the Linguistics Department, working on an inter-dialectal Arabic corpus analysis project for Abbas Benmamoun.
2006
2006 Grader in the Linguistics Department, for the class LING 307. which is taught by Peter Lasersohn.
2006 Tutor in the Linguistics Department, for the class LING402. which is taught by Richard Sproat.
2006 Research appointment with Roxana Girju at the Beckman Institute, developing a system for automated extraction of causal relations from text.
2004-2006 Research appointment with Richard Sproat at the Beckman Institute, developing a named entity recognition system called REFLEX.
2005
2005 Internship with Zhu Liu and David Gibbon at AT&T Laboratories, developing a system for automated capitalization of text and automated web document mining.
2004
2004 Technical Specialist at McNeil Technologies, Language Research Center, developing a dictionary of new Arabic words by computational methods.
2003
2002-2003 Research assistant with Bonnie Dorr at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, developing a syntactic projection system for machine translation called DUSTer.
2003 Research assistant with Michael O'Donavan Anderson and Don Perlis at the Computer Science Department at University of Maryland - College Park, developing an ontology for meta-language in conversation.
Personal
I practice martial arts. Kenkojuko Shotokan Karate, Capoeira, Jiu-jitsu, Ryu-kyu Kempo.
My favorite writer is Orson Scott Card.
Contact
office:
Beckman Institute, Room #2023
email:
afister2 a@t uiuc d0t edu
address:
4080 Foreign Languages Building
707 South Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL, 61801