My homepage and publications are now hosted at dustin.rigghillard.com

Search engines may find me by Dustin Hillard or by Dustin Rigg Hillard (I've added Julianna's last name to mine).

This page was last updated Nov 2010

Dustin Hillard

On top of Kilimanjaro - Tanzania, Africa

I finished in January 2008 and now work at Yahoo! as a Scientist. My dissertation is titled Automatic Sentence Structure Annotation for Spoken Language Processing.

Univeristy of Washington Electrical Engineering

Signal, Speech and Language Interpretation Lab

Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington (2008).
Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington (2004).
Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from University of Washington, Cum Laude with College Honors (2002).

Research

Graduate

MIT Licoln Labs Fellowship (2006)
NSF DDEP Award: Guest researcher at i6, RWTH in Aachen, Germany (March-August 2006)
Fellow, Program on Networked Governance, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard (2006-2007)
Sentence Structure in Speech for Machine Translation, GALE Project
Sentence Boundary Detection and Classification, EARS Project
Voted runner-up for best paper award at the DARPA EARS RT04 Workshop

Undergraduate

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Assistant Award
Automatic detection of agreement and disagreement in meetings

Dissertation

Dustin Hillard. Automatic Sentence Structure Annotation for Spoken Language Processing, PhD Thesis, University of Washington, 2008.

Journal Publications and Book Chapters

Dustin Hillard, Stephen Purpura, and John Wilkerson. Computer Assisted Topic Classification for Mixed Methods Social Science Research, Journal of Information Technology and Politics, V4(4)4, pp. 31-46, May, 2008.
Mari Ostendorf, Benoit Favre, Ralph Grishman, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Mary Harper, Dustin Hillard, Julia Hirschberg, Heng Ji, Jeremy G. Kahn, Yang Liu, Sameer Maskey, Evegeny Matusov, Hermann Ney, Andrew Rosenberg, Elizabeth Shriberg, Weng Wang and Chuck Wooters. Speech Segmentation and Spoken Document Processing, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on Spoken Language Technology, V25(3), pp. 59-69, May, 2008.
Mari Ostendorf, Benoit Favre, Ralph Grishman, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Mary Harper, Dustin Hillard, Julia B. Hirschberg, Heng Ji, Jeremy G Kahn, Yang Liu, Evgeny Matusov, Hermann Ney, Elizabeth Shriberg, Wen Wang, Chuck Wooters. Speech Segmentation and Its Impact on Spoken Document Processing. Book chapter for Global Automatic Language Exploitation.
Yang Liu, Elizabeth Shriberg, Andreas Stolcke, Dustin Hillard, Mari Ostendorf, and Mary Harper. Enriching Speech Recognition with Sentence Boundaries and Disfluencies, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, V14(5), pp. 1526-1540, September, 2006.

Conference Publications

Dustin Hillard and Chris Leggetter. Clicked Phrase Document Expansion for Sponsored Search Ad Retrieval. SIGIR. 2010.
Sameer Singh, Dustin Hillard and Chris Leggetter. Minimally-Supervised Extraction of Entities from Text Advertisements. NAACL-HLT. 2010.
Dustin Hillard, Stefan Schroedl, Eren Manavoglu, Hema Raghavan and Chris Leggetter. Improving Ad Relevance in Sponsored Search. WSDM. 2010.
Tasos Anastasakos, Dustin Hillard, Sanjay Kshetramade and Hema Raghavan. Collaborative Filtering Approach to Ad Recommendation using the Query Ad Click Graph. CIKM. 2009.
Hema Raghavan and Dustin Hillard. A Relevance Model Based Filter for Improving Ad Quality. SIGIR. 2009.
Dustin Hillard, Mei-Yuh Hwang, Mary Harper, Mari Ostendorf. Parsing-based Objective Functions for Speech Recognition in Translation Applications. ICASSP, 2008.
Benoit Favre, Ralph Grishman, Dustin Hillard, Heng Ji, Dilek Hakkani-Tur and Mari Ostendorf. Punctuating Speech for Information Extraction. ICASSP, 2008.
Stephen Purpura, John Wilkerson, Dustin Hillard. The U.S. Policy Agenda Legislation Corpus Volume 1 - a Language Resource from 1947 - 1998. LREC, 2008.
Dustin Hillard, Björn Hoffmeister, Mari Ostendorf, Ralf Schülter, and Hermann Ney. iROVER: Improving System Combination with Classification. NAACL-HLT, 2007.
Evgeny Matusov, Dustin Hillard, Mathew Magimai-Doss, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Mari Ostendorf, and Hermann Ney. Improving Speech Translation with Automatic Boundary Prediction. Interspeech, 2007.
Dustin Hillard, Stephen Purpura, and John Wilkerson. An Active Learning Framework for Classifying Political Text. Midwest Political Science Association 65th Annual National Conference, 2007.
Stephen Purpura, Kevin Esterling, Dustin Hillard, David Lazer, and Michael Neblo. Declaring Independence from the President in the 2008 Midterm Elections . Midwest Political Science Association 65th Annual National Conference, 2007.
Björn Hoffmeister, Dustin Hillard, Stefan Hahn, Ralf Schülter, Mari Ostendorf and Hermann Ney. Cross-site and Intra-Site ASR System Combination: Comparisons on Lattice and 1-Best Methods. ICASSP, 2007.
Dustin Hillard, Zhongqiang Huang, Heng Ji, Ralph Grishman, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Mary Harper, Mari Ostendorf, Wen Wang. Impact of Automatic Comma Prediction on POS/Name Tagging of Speech. SLT, 2006.
William McNeill, Jeremy Kahn, Dustin Hillard, and Mari Ostendorf. Parse Structure and Segmentation for Improving Speech Recognition. SLT, 2006.
Dustin Hillard and Mari Ostendorf. Compensating for Word Posterior Estimation Bias in Confusion Networks. ICASSP, 2006.
Stephen Purpura and Dustin Hillard. Automated Classification of Congressional Legislation. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Digital Government Research, 2006.
Yang Liu, Elizabeth Shriberg, Andreas Stolcke, Barbara Peskin, Jeremy Ang, Dustin Hillard, Mari Ostendorf, Marcus Tomalin, Phil Woodland, and Mary Harper. Structural Metatada Research in the EARS Program, Invited paper. ICASSP, 2005.
Dustin Hillard, Mari Ostendorf, Andreas Stolcke, Yang Liu and Elizabeth Shriberg. Improving Automatic Sentence Boundary Detection with Confusion Networks. HLT-NAACL, 2004.
Yang Liu, Elizabeth Shriberg, Andreas Stolcke, Dustin Hillard, Mari Ostendorf, Barbara Peskin, and Mary Harper. The ICSI-SRI-UW Metadata Extraction System. ICSLP, 2004.
Dustin Hillard, Mari Ostendorf, and Elizabeth Shriberg. Detection of Agreement vs. Disagreement in Meetings: Training with Unlabeled Data. HLT-NAACL, 2003.

Workshop Presentations

Mari Ostendorf, Jeremy G. Kahn, and Dustin Hillard. "Spontaneous Speech: Challenges and Opportunities for Parsing." Invited talk. International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, 2005
Dustin Hillard, Mari Ostendorf, and Andreas Stolcke. Accounting for STT Uncertainty in MDE. EARS RT04 Workshop, 2004.
Mari Ostendorf and Dustin Hillard. Scoring Structural MDE: Towards More Meaningful Error Rates . EARS RT04 Workshop, 2004.
M. Ostendorf, J. Kahn, D. Wong, D. Hillard and W. McNeill. Leveraging Structural MDE in Language Processing. EARS RT04 Workshop, 2004.

Invited Talks:

Dustin Hillard and Stephen Purpura. "Spying on Politicians in Plain Sight: Applying Machine Learning to Automatically Analyze Political Texts," Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. April 2007.
Dustin Hillard. "Predicting Sub-Sentence Structure for Spoken Language Processing," Lincoln Labs, MIT, Lexington, MA. November 2006.
Dustin Hillard. "Punctuation Detection for Mandarin Speech," Karlsruhe University, Karlsruhe, Germany. June 2006.
Dustin Hillard. "Sentence Prediction and Cues for Machine Translation," RWTH, Aachen, Germany. April 2006.

Class Projects

EE596 (Statistical Pattern Recognition) - Topic Classification for Conversational Speech: Support Vector Machines and Latent Semantic Analysis
EE516 (Computer Speech Processing) - Sentence Boundary Detection for Broadcast News

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