Publications

We present results from a new machine translation comprehension test, similar to those developed in previous work (Jones et al., 2007). This test has documents in four conditions: (1) original English documents; (2) human translations of the documents into Arabic; conditions (3) and (4) are machine translations of the Arabic...

This paper describes a new method for task-based speech-to-speech machine translation evaluation, in which tasks are defined and assessed according to independent published standards, both for the military tasks performed and for the foreign language skill levels used. We analyze task success rates and automatic MT evaluation scores (BLEU and...

This paper describes a comprehensive humanitarian assessment tool designed and used following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. The tool was developed under Joint Task Force -- Haiti coordination using indicators of humanitarian needs to support decision making by the United States Government, agencies of the United Nations, and various non-governmental...

Recent work on signal detection in graph-based data focuses on classical detection when the signal and noise are both in the form of discrete entities and their relationships. In practice, the relationships of interest may not be directly observable, or may be observed through a noisy mechanism. The effects of...

In this work, we propose a framework that automatically discovers dialect-specific phonetic rules. These rules characterize when certain phonetic or acoustic transformations occur across dialects. To explicitly characterize these dialect-specific rules, we adapt the conventional hidden Markov model to handle insertion and deletion transformations. The proposed framework is able to...

Twitter is a massive platform for open communication between diverse groups of people. While traditional media segregates the world's population on lines of language, age, physical location, social status, and many other characteristics, Twitter cuts through these divides. The result is an extremely diverse social network. In this work, we...

This paper describes an adaptation of cognitive radio technology for tactical wireless networking. We introduce Competing Cognitive Radio Network (CCRN) featuring both communicator and jamming cognitive radio nodes that strategize in taking actions on an open spectrum under the presence of adversarial threats. We present the problem in the Multi-armed...

This paper describes the MIT-LL/AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the IWSLT 2013 evaluation campaign [1]. As part of these efforts, we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on the Russian to English, Chinese to English, Arabic...

We introduce Competing Mobile Network Game (CMNG), a stochastic game played by cognitive radio networks that compete for dominating an open spectrum access. Differentiated from existing approaches, we incorporate both communicator and jamming nodes to form a network for friendly coalition, integrate antijamming and jamming subgames into a stochastic framework...

In this paper we introduce a new baseline for language-independent text difficulty assessment applied to the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale. We demonstrate that reading level assessment is a discriminative problem that is best-suited for regression. Our baseline uses z-normalized shallow length features and TF-LOG weighted vectors on bag-of-words...