Ben Hixon

About me

• March 2013: I was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. My tenure begins in the Fall and will continue for three years.
• September 2012: I started my Ph.D at UW. I am working with Oren Etzioni and the Open IE group on relation extraction and dialogue interfaces for machine reading.
• Summer 2012: I interned at Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems. I worked with Becky Passonneau on portable dialogue management (using the same dialogue manager for different domains).
• May 2012: I graduated from Hunter College CUNY with a BA in computer science. I worked with Susan Epstein on machine learning for spoken dialogue and recommender systems.

My research interests

• In general: Natural language processing, machine learning, information extraction, machine reading, dialogue.
• In particular: Dialogue interfaces for open-domain machine reading, large-scale semantic parsing, and conversational search over large knowledge bases.

My publications

• Ben Hixon and Rebecca Passonneau. (2013). Open Dialogue Management for Relational Databases. To be presented at the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL 2013). Atlanta, Georgia. June 10-12, 2013.
• Susan Epstein, Eric Osisek, Ben Hixon, and Rebecca Passonneau. (2012). Similarity and Plausible Recommendations. First Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems. Palo Alto, California, December 6-8, 2012.
• Ben Hixon, Rebecca Passonneau, and Susan Epstein. (2012). Semantic Specificity in Spoken Dialogue Requests. 13th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue. Seoul, South Korea, July 5-6, 2012.
• Ben Hixon, Eric Schneider, and Susan Epstein (2011). Phonemic similarity metrics to compare pronunciation methods. Interspeech 2011. Florence, Italy. 28-31 August 2011.