Swapna Somasundaran

Hi, I am a Director-Research, NLP in the AI Labs, which is a part of the R&D division at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, NJ. I supervise a group of NLP and speech scientists working on various educational research areas.

Before coming to ETS, I was a Research Scientist at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR), Princeton, New Jersey. At SCR, I worked on lexical semantics and relationship mining, amongst other things. I received my PhD from Computer Science department of the  University of Pittsburgh and my MSE in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University.

My primary research areas are NLP and AI. I am interested in many aspects of Natural Language Processing like subjectivity and sentiment analysis, discourse, dialogs, narratives, question answering and generation.

At ETS, I continue to work on these and many other aspects of language with my collegues, applying them specifically for the task of automated assessments and content generation.

 Here is my (outdated as of July 2021)  CV

Publications

**  My Google Scholar page tends to be more up to date

Goran Glavas and Swapna Somasundaran (2019) Two-Level Transformer and Auxiliary Coherence Modeling for Improved Text Segmentation, AAAI 2020, New York, USA

Paul Deane, Swapna Somasundaran, René R. Lawless, Hilary Persky, and Colleen Appel (2019). The Key Practice, Building and Sharing Stories and Social Understandings: The Intrinsic Value of Narrative. ETS Research Report Series (2019)

Michael Flor and Swapna Somasundaran (2019). Lexical concreteness in narrative, In proceedings of the Storytelling workshop, Florence, Italy

Swapna Somasundaran, Martin Chodorow, Jill Burstein (2019) Use of Topic Signatures to Detect Relevant Source Content and Essay US Patent Quality Docket No.: 011948-1274-999 Serial No.: 15/291,400

Swapna Somasundaran, Chong Min Lee, Martin Chodorow, Xinhao Wang (2019). Automated Scoring of Picture-Based Story Narration. US Patent (Docket No.: 011948-1163-999, Serial No.: 15/055,417)

Swapna Somasundaran,   Michael Flor,  Martin  Chodorow, Hillary Molloy,  Binod  Gyawali,  and Laura McCulla. (2018). Towards Evaluating Narrative Quality In Student Writing, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL),  Vol. 6. p(91--106) 

Michael Flor and Swapna Somasundaran (2017) Sentiment Analysis and Lexical Cohesion for the Story Cloze Task , in Proceedings of LSDSem 2017, Valencia, Spain

Somasundaran, Swapna, Martin Chodorow, and Joel Tetreault. Systems and methods for automated scoring of textual responses to picture-based items. U.S. Patent No. 9,836,985. 5 Dec. 2017

Burstein, Jill, Swapna Somasundaran, and Martin Chodorow. Computer-implemented systems and methods for measuring discourse coherence. U.S. Patent No. 9,665,566. 30 May 2017.

Swapna Somasundaran, Brian Riordan, Binod Gyawali and Su-Youn Yoon (2016) Evaluating Argumentative and Narrative Essays using Graphs , in Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Osaka, Japan

Swapna Somasundaran, Yoko Futagi, Nitin Madnani, Nancy Glazer, Matt Chametsky and Cathy Wendler (2016). Prediction of Passage Acceptance/Rejection Using Linguistic Information. Presented at the 78th Annual Meeting for the National Council on Measurement in Education NCME 2016, Washington, DC, USA.

Lei Chen, Ben Leong, Gary Feng, Chong Min Lee, and Swapna Somasundaran (2015) Utilizing Multimodal Cues to Automatically Evaluate Public Speaking Performance , in Proceedings of International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Xi'an, China, 2015

Swapna Somasundaran, Chong Min Lee, Martin Chodorow and Xinhao Wang (2015) Automated Scoring of Picture-based Story Narration , The 10th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, NAACL 2015, Denver, CO, USA

Noura Farra, Swapna Somasundaran and Jill Burstein (2015) Scoring Persuasive Essays Using Opinions and their Targets . The 10th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, NAACL 2015, Denver, CO, USA

Swapna Somasundaran Jill Burstein and Martin Chodorow, (2014) Lexical Chaining for Measuring Discourse Coherence Quality in Test-taker Essays , COLING 2014, Dublin, Ireland

Swapna Somasundaran and Martin Chodorow, (2014) Automated Measures of Specific Vocabulary Knowledge from Constructed Responses (“Use TheseWords to Write a Sentence Based on this Picture”), In Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, Baltimore, Maryland, ACL 2014

Jill Burstein, Swapna Somasundaran and Martin Chodorow, (2014) Finding your “inner-annotator”: An experiment in annotator independence for rating discourse coherence quality in essays. 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW VIII 2014) , Dublin, Ireland.

Beata Beigman Klebanov, Nitin Madnani, Jill Burstein and Swapna Somasundaran (2014) Content Importance Models for Scoring Writing From Sources. , In Poceedings of ACL 2014 (short papers) Baltimore, Maryland

Kateryna Tymoshenko, Swapna Somasundaran, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Vinay Damodar Shet (2012) Relation Mining in the Biomedical Domain using Entity-level Semantics ECAI 2012: 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montpellier, France, August 27-31 (acceptance rate = 28%)

Swapna Somasundaran, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Vinay Damodar Shet, Kateryna Tymoshenko, Mathäus Dejori (2014 patent issued; filed in 2012)  System for generating a medical knowledge base US Patent 8,639,678.

Kateryna Tymoshenko, Swapna Somasundaran, Vinay Damodar Shet. (2014 patent issued; filed in 2012) System for linking medical terms for a medical knowledge base. US Patent 8,700,589. 

Dingcheng Li, Swapna Somasundaran and Amit Chakraborty (2012) ERD-MedLDA: Entity relation detection using supervised topic models with maximum margin learning Journal of Natural Language Engineering (JNLE), 18 , pp 263-289 doi:10.1017/S1351324912000058

Swapna Somasundaran, Dingcheng Li and Amit Chakraborty (2011) Information relation generation (Patent pending: EP2434415 A3, US20120078918 A1)

Dingcheng Li, Swapna Somasundaran and Amit Chakraborty (2011) A Combination of Topic Models with Max-margin Learning for Relation Detection In Proceedings of TextGraphs-6: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing, Workshop at ACL-HLT 2011, Portland, Oregon

Swapna Somasundaran (2010), Discourse-level relations for Opinion Analysis, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.

Swapna Somasundaran and Janyce Wiebe, (2010), Recognizing Stances in Ideological On-line Debates. ,  In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Analysis and Generation of Emotion in Text, pages 116-124, Los Angeles, CA. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010. Data for this paper can be downloaded from here

Swapna Somasundaran and Janyce Wiebe, (2009), Recognizing Stances in Online Debates ,  ACL 2009: Joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, August 2-7, 2009, Singapore. Data for this paper can be downloaded from here

Swapna Somasundaran, Galileo Namata, Janyce Wiebe and Lise Getoor (2009) Supervised and Unsupervised Methods in Employing Discourse Relations for Improving Opinion Polarity Classification ,  EMNLP 2009: conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing August 6-7, 2009, Singapore.

Swapna Somasundaran, Galileo Namata, Lise Getoor and Janyce Wiebe, (2009) Opinion Graphs for Polarity and Discourse Classification , TextGraphs-4: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing, 7th August 2009, Singapore

Swapna Somasundaran, Janyce Wiebe and Josef Ruppenhofer (2008) Discourse Level Opinion Interpretation,  Coling, Manchester, 18-22 August, 2008

Swapna Somasundaran, Josef Ruppenhofer and Janyce Wiebe (2008) Discourse Level Opinion Relations: An Annotation Study, SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Columbus, Ohio,  June 2008

Josef Ruppenhofer, Swapna Somasundaran and Janyce Wiebe (2008)  Finding the Sources and Targets of Subjective Expressions. LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco.  

Swapna Somasundaran, Josef Ruppenhofer and Janyce Wiebe (2007)  Detecting Arguing and Sentiment in Meetings SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Antwerp, Belgium, September  2007

Swapna Somasundaran, Theresa Wilson, Janyce Wiebe and Veselin Stoyanov (2007) QA with Attitude: Exploiting Opinion Type Analysis for Improving Question Answering in On-line Discussions and the News, International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media March 26-28, 2007, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.

Swapna Somasundaran, Janyce Wiebe, Paul Hoffmann, Diane Litman  (2006).Manual Annotation of Opinion Categories in Meetings. ACL Workshop: Frontiers in Linguistically Annotated Corpora(Coling/ACL 2006) , Sydney, Australia

Theresa Wilson, Paul Hoffmann, Swapna Somasundaran, Jason Kessler, JanyceWiebe, Yejin Choi, Claire Cardie, Ellen Riloff, Siddharth Patwardhan (2005). OpinionFinder: A system for subjectivity analysis Demo in Human Language Technologies Conference/Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP 2005), Vancouver, Canada.