Research Home

Abe's Projects

I've been involved in a number of different projects. Below are some current and past projects that I've worked on.

Emotion

there is a subgroup of the SAIL lab that works on researching emotion-related phenomenon. My focus is on emotion in text, in dialog contexts, and for user modeling. Here is a link for the emotion group's webpage, and here is a link to my work on emotions in text. My thesis is about how people use natural language to describe emotions. It involves fuzzy logic, natural language processing, and a game called Emotion Twenty Questions (EMO20Q) .
I also have been working on sentiment analysis, in particular a joint SAIL/AIL project to analyze the sentiment of Twitter Tweets for the 2012 US Presidential election (please note that this is a research site -- whether twitter reflects the wider public sentiment is an open question -- and also please expect some down times with the site).

Children's Language and Technology Literacy

TBALL is a joint project between USC, UCLA, Berkeley, and the Los Angeles Unified School District. It stands for Technology-Based Assessment of Language and Literacy. The goal is to assess children's oral reading skills using speech recognition, develop literacy testing standards, and provide useful feedback to teachers. Here's a link that I maintain regarding my work on the project and here's the project homepage
The FAMLI afterschool program OLPC pilot is a joint project between FAMLI afterschool program and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) . It aims to develop technology literacy among middle schoolers, with the help of the open source community.

COMMUNICATOR project

Though I didn't work on the communicator project while it was active, Dr. Shri Narayanan, my advisor, did before he came to USC. I've analyzed the recordings, transcripts, and logs off-line. The COMMUNICATOR project was a DARPA-sponsored voice-automated airline ticketing application developed by several unversities and companies.

CLAM

CLAM stands for C++ Library for Audio and Music. It is a Qt-based library being developed by open source methodologies. The people working on it are from all over, but the main institution is Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. I worked on this project through thanks to the Google Summer of Code.