Eric Nichols

I am a Researcher in the Communication Science Laboratory at Tohoku University. I have a Doctor of Engineering from Nara Institute of Science and Technology.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Natural Language Processing

• Machine Translation
  • Japanese-English Machine Translation with Minimal Recursion Semantics using LOGON
• Grammar Development and Parsing
  • Japanese HPSG Parsing Using Dependency Structures
• Semantics and Knowledge Acquisition
  • The Hinoki Treebank -- a Japanese HPSG Treebank (homepage)
• Word Alignment
  • Divergence Unraveling for Statistical Translation (DUSTer)

Publications

• Toward Evidence Search (pdf)
  Eric Nichols, Junta Mizuno, Yotaro Watanabe, and Kentaro Inui.
  Proceedings of The Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing. 2011.
  
• 言論マップ生成技術の現状と課題
  水野淳太, Eric Nichols, 渡邉陽太郎, 村上浩司, 松吉俊, 大木環美, 乾健太郎, 松本裕治
  言語処理学会第17回年次大会. 2011.
  
• Web文書の時間・論理関係分析に基つく情報信頼性判断支援システムの開発と実証実験
  岡嶋穣, 河合剛巨, 中澤聡, 村上浩司, 松吉俊, 水野淳太, エリック・ニコルス, 渡邉陽太郎, 乾健太郎, 渋木英潔, 中野正寛, 宮崎林太郎, 石下円香, 森辰則
  言語処理学会第17回年次大会. 2011.
  
• Recognizing Confinement in Web Texts (pdf)
  Megumi Ohki, Eric Nichols, Suguru Matsuyoshi, Koji Murakami, Junta Mizuno, Shouko Masuda, Kentaro Inui and Yuji Matsumoto.
  The 9th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2011). Oxford, UK.
  
• Statement Map: Reducing Web Information Credibility Noise through Opinion Classification (pdf)
  Koji Murakami, Eric Nichols, Junta Mizuno, Yotaro Watanabe, Shouko Masuda, Hayato Goto, Megumi Ohki, Chitose Sao, Suguru Matsuyoshi, Kentaro Inui, Yuji Matsumoto.
  Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (AND2010). Toronto, Canada.
  
• Automatic Classification of Semantic Relations between Facts and Opinions (pdf)
  Koji Murakami, Eric Nichols, Junta Mizuno, Yotaro Watanabe, Hayato Goto, Megumi Ohki, Suguru Matsuyoshi, Kentaro Inui, Yuji Matsumoto.
  Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on NLP Challenges in the Information Explosion Era (NLPIX 2010). Beijing, China.
  
• Paraphrasing Training Data for Statistical Machine Translation (pdf)
  Eric Nichols, Francis Bond, D. Scott Appling, Yuji Matsumoto
  Journal of Natural Language Processing. 17(3), 2010.
  Special Issue on Empirical Methods for Asian Language Processing.
  
• Constructing a Scientific Blog Corpus for Information Credibility Analysis (paper) (slides)
  Eric Nichols, Koji Murakami, Kentaro Inui, and Yuji Matsumoto.
  Proceedings of Pacling 2009. Hokkaido, Japan. 2009.
  
• 複数文書から抽出した言明間の意味的関係の整理と関係付与
  村上浩司, 増田祥子, 松吉俊, Eric Nichols, 乾健太郎, 松本裕治
  電子情報通信学会 言語理解とコミュニケーション研究会, July 2009.
  
• Annotating Semantic Relations Combining Facts and Opinions (pdf)
  Koji Murakami, Shouko Masuda, Suguru Matsuyoshi, Eric Nichols, Kentaro Inui, and Yuji Matsumoto
  The Third Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW III). Suntec, Singapore. 2009.
  
• Statement Map: Assisting Information Credibility Analysis by Visualizing Arguments (pdf)
  Koji Murakami, Eric Nichols, Suguru Matsuyoshi, Asuka Sumida, Shouko Masuda, Kentaro Inui, Yuji Matsumoto.
  Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web (WICOW 2009), Pages 43-50. Madrid, Spain. 2009.
  
• Constructing a Scientific Blog Corpus for Information Credibility Analysis (poster)
  Eric Nichols, Koji Murakami, Kentaro Inui, and Yuji Matsumoto.
  Proceedings of The Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing. 2009.
  
• Improving Statistical Machine Translation by Paraphrasing the Training Data (pdf).
  Francis Bond, Eric Nichols, Darren Scott Appling, and Michael Paul.
  Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation. 2008.
  
• An Interactive, Text-Based Translation Aid Environment (pdf)
  Eric Nichols and Yuji Matsumoto.
  Proceedings of The Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing, Pages 333-336. 2008.
  
• Acme as an Interactive Translation Environment (html) (pdf)
  Eric Nichols and Yuji Matsumoto.
  Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Plan 9, Murray Hill, New Jersey. 2007.
  
• Combining Resources for Open Source Machine Translation (pdf)
  Eric Nichols, Francis Bond, Darren Scott Appling, and Yuji Matsumoto.
  The 11th International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation (TMI-07), Pages 134-143. Skövde, Sweden. 2007.
• Automatic Transfer Rule Acquisition for Semantic Transfer Based MT
  Eric Nichols, Francis Bond, Yuji Matsumoto.
  IPSJ SIG Technical Reports, 2007-NL-178, Pages 77-84. 2007.
  
• Robust Ontology Acquisition from Multiple Sources (pdf)
  Eric Nichols, Francis Bond, Takaaki Tanaka, Sanae Fujita, Daniel Flickinger.
  Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population: Bridging the Gap between Text and Knowledge, Sydney, Pages 10-17. 2006.
  
• Robust Ontology Acquisition from Machine-Readable Dictionaries (pdf)
  Eric Nichols, Francis Bond, Daniel Flickinger.
  Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI-2005, Edinburgh, Pages 1111-1116. 2005.
  
• Using Dependency Relations as Constraints in HPSG Parsing
  Eric Nichols and Yuji Matsumoto.
  Proceedings of The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing, Pages 899-902. 2005
  
• Acquiring Ontologies Using Deep and Shallow Processing
  Eric Nichols and Francis Bond.
  Proceedings of The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing, Pages 494-497. 2005.
  
• Acquiring an Ontology for a Fundamental Vocabulary (pdf)
  Francis Bond, Eric Nichols, Sanae Fujita, Takaaki Tanaka.
  Coling 2004 Proceedings, Pages 1319-1325. 2004
  
• The Hinoki Treebank: Toward Text Understanding (pdf)
  Francis Bond, Sanae Fujita, Chikara Hashimoto, Kaname Kasahara, Shigeko Nariyama, Eric Nichols, Akira Ohtani, Takaaki Tanaka, Shigeaki Amano.
  The 5th International Workshop on Linguistically Interpreted Corpora (LINC-04) Proceedings, Pages 7-10. 2004.
  
• The Hinoki Treebank: A Treebank for Text Understanding (pdf)
  Francis Bond, Sanae Fujita, Chikara Hashimoto, Kaname Kasahara, Shigeko Nariyama, Eric Nichols, Akira Ohtani, Takaaki Tanaka, Shigeki Amano.
  International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) 2004 Proceedings, Pages 554-559. 2004.
  
• 統計的係り受け解析と制約文法の融合による日本語文解析 (pdf)
  東 藍, Eric Nichols, 森本.
  情報処理学会研究報告 2004-NL-159, Pages 131-138. 2004.
  
• 日本語ツリーバンク「檜」: 言語理解のためのコーパス (pdf)
  Francis Bond, 藤田早苗, 橋本力, 笠原要, 成山重子, Eric Nichols, 大谷朗, 田中貴秋, 天野成昭.
  情報処理学会研究報告 2004-NL-159, Pages 83-90. 2004.
  
• 精細な文法に基づいたツリーバンク「檜」の構築 (pdf)
  Francis Bond, 藤田早苗, 橋本力, 成山重子, Eric Nichols, 大谷朗, 田中貴秋.
  情報処理学会研究報告 2004-NL-159, Pages 90-98. 2004.

Computing

Ubuntu NLP

• Most of the software tools I use in my research are open-source UNIX programs.
• The Ubuntu Linux distribution provides high-quality software packages and a polished GUI.
• It provides an ideal environment for NLP because many popular tools are open-source programs that run on Linux.
• However, there aren't many NLP programs packaged for Ubuntu.
• To fill this gap, I have created a The Ubuntu NLP Repository with the aim of making NLP software easier to install and use.

Acme SAC for Mac OS-X

• I am also interested in Plan 9 -- UNIX done right with Unicode support built in from the ground up.
  
• Plan 9 from User Space brings many of its benefits, including the excellent Acme text editor to Linux and Mac OS-X users.
• I have ported Acme SAC, a stand-alone Acme implementation based on the Inferno hosted operating system to Mac OS-X.
  Download (for versions of Mac OS-X >= 10.3): Acme SAC for Mac OS-X (old versions)

Educational History

• Doctor of Engineering in the field of Information Processing (March, 2010).
• Master of Engineering in the field of Information Processing (March, 2005).

• Bachelor of Science in the field of Computer Science (December, 2002).
• Bachelor of Arts in the field of Japanese (December, 2002).

Other Interests

• Tea Ceremony (NAIST's Tea Ceremony Club)
• Music (especially Jazz, Classical, Blues)
  What am I listening to?
  
  

Life in Japan

• Photographs

Contact Information

Last modified: Wed Aug 31 15:31:53 JST 2011