Abstract: Techniques for automatically computing a programmer proficiency rating for one or more programmers are provided. The techniques include obtaining one or more programmer artifacts for each programmer to be assessed, obtaining one or more programmer artifacts and one or more human proficiency ratings for a separate set of one or more programmers, training a first module to learn a rating model from the one or more programmer artifacts and one or more human proficiency ratings for the separate set of one or more programmers, and using a second module to apply the rating model to the one or more programmer artifacts for each programmer to be assessed to automatically generate the programmer proficiency rating for each programmer. Techniques are also provided for generating a database of one or more programmer proficiency ratings.

Abstract: Techniques for automatically computing a programmer proficiency rating for one or more programmers are provided. The techniques include obtaining one or more programmer artifacts for each programmer to be assessed, obtaining one or more programmer artifacts and one or more human proficiency ratings for a separate set of one or more programmers, training a first module to learn a rating model from the one or more programmer artifacts and one or more human proficiency ratings for the separate set of one or more programmers, and using a second module to apply the rating model to the one or more programmer artifacts for each programmer to be assessed to automatically generate the programmer proficiency rating for each programmer. Techniques are also provided for generating a database of one or more programmer proficiency ratings.

Abstract: A system for recovering from an interruption of communication on a network between computer users which includes a computer network connecting a plurality of users using computers in a communication session. A computer readable medium encoded with a computer program is connected to at least one of the users' computers for storing generated communication between the users during the communication session. The computer program reconnects the session between the users, and restores the generated communication between the users after detecting an interruption of the session.

Abstract: Systems and methods are provided for automated semantic role labeling for languages having complex morphology. In one aspect, a method for processing natural language text includes receiving as input a natural language text sentence comprising a sequence of white-space delimited words including inflicted words that are formed of morphemes including a stem and one or more affixes, identifying a target verb as a stem of an inflicted word in the text sentence, grouping morphemes from one or more inflicted words with the same syntactic role into constituents, and predicting a semantic role of a constituent for the target verb.

Abstract: A Bell Tree data structure is provided to model the process of chaining the mentions, from one or more documents, into entities, tracking the entire process; where the data structure is used in an entity tracking process that produces multiple results ranked by a product of probability scores.

Abstract: Methods and apparatus are provided for annotating documents with one or more of entities, events and relations. Documents are annotated by presenting the document to a user; presenting the user with a list of possible entity types, wherein the list of possible entity types is configurable; and obtaining at least one mention annotation that associates a selected phrase in the document with one of the possible entity types. The selected phrase can be presented to the user, for example, based on one or more presentation rules associated with the associated entity type. The method can be implemented, for example, in a client-server configuration where a browser communicates with a remote server.

Abstract: A Bell Tree data structure is provided to model the process of chaining the mentions, from one or more documents, into entities, tracking the entire process; where the data structure is used in an entity tracking process that produces multiple results ranked by a product of probability scores.

Abstract: Methods and apparatus are provided for annotating documents with one or more of entities, events and relations. Documents are annotated by presenting the document to a user; presenting the user with a list of possible entity types, wherein the list of possible entity types is configurable; and obtaining at least one mention annotation that associates a selected phrase in the document with one of the possible entity types. The selected phrase can be presented to the user, for example, based on one or more presentation rules associated with the associated entity type. The method can be implemented, for example, in a client-server configuration where a browser communicates with a remote server.

Abstract: A Bell Tree data structure is provided to model the process of chaining the mentions, from one or more documents, into entities, tracking the entire process; where the data structure is used in an entity tracking process that produces multiple results ranked by a product of probability scores.

Abstract: This patent describes a novel system, method, and program product that are used in interactive natural language dialog. One or more presentation managers operating on a computer system present information from the computer system to one or more users over network interface(s) and accept queries from the users using one or more known input/output modalities (e.g. Speech, typed in text, pointing devices, etc.). A natural language parser parses one or more natural language phrases received over one or more of the network interfaces by one or more of the presentation managers into one or more logical forms (parsed user input), each logical form having a grammatical and structural organization. A dialog manager module maintains and directs interactive sessions between each of the users and the computer system.

Abstract: The invention is directed towards an automated system for extracting voice messages from a voice mail system and for providing unified access to voice mail and electronic mail or voice mail and the internet. For a given user, a voice mail remote access server connects to the user's voice mail system through a telephone or data network, and uses speech recognition and understanding to navigate through the prompts of the voice mail system and extract the user's voice mail. Depending upon the access mechanism preferred by the user, the voice messages are sent as e-mail messages with attachments (audio files) to the user or made accessible to the user's world wide web server or displayed to the user using a stand-alone voice mail player application.

Abstract: Disclosed is a system and a method for combining the computational resources of numerous embedded devices to enable any of them to perform complex tasks like speech recognition or natural language understanding. A distinguished master device communicates with a network of embedded devices, and organizes them as the nodes of a neural network. To each node (embedded device) in the neural network, the master device sends the activation function for that node and the connectivity pattern for that node. The master device sends the inputs for the network to the distinguished input nodes of the network. During computation, each node computes the activation function of all of its inputs and sends its activation to all the nodes to which it needs to send output to. The outputs of the neural network are sent to the master device. Thus, the network of embedded devices can perform any computation (like speech recognition, natural language understanding, etc.) which can be mapped onto a neural network model.

Abstract: An automated system generates and revises grammars for speech recognizers in a speech recognition system. Given an initial grammar, expressed in terms of non-terminals in Backus-Naur Form (BNF) notation, a sentence generator generates a list of all sentences accepted by the grammar. From this list, a corpus of inappropriate or irrelevant sentences which are accepted by the grammar (counter-examples) is identified. A grammar revisor program uses the original grammar and the list of counter examples, to generate a pruned list from which a revised grammar is generated. The revision process is iterated several times either concatenating or merging pairs of non-terminals until the revised grammar is deemed satisfactory in that it accepts as legal only relevant sentences. The revised grammar is used by the speech recognizer, thus reducing errors in the overall system.