Constantine Lignos

2nd year PhD Student in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania

Office: IRCS 410

Resources

Research

I'm primarily interested in creating more linguistically informed and psychologically plausible computational models of language acquisition. I am advised by Mitch Marcus and Charles Yang. I'm also interested in non-statistical approaches to NLP and the implications of sparse data in language learning.

Background

I graduated from Yale in 2006 with a B.A. in Computer Science and Psychology. As an undergraduate I performed research in social robotics, working with Brian Scassellati and Emily Wang, and unsupervised language learning, with Charles Yang. I also spent a tremendous amount of time working on the shows and serving on the board of the The Yale Dramat.

Publications

Constantine Lignos, Erwin Chan, Charles Yang, Mitchell P. Marcus
Evidence for a morphological acquisition model from development data
To appear, proceedings of BUCLD 34.
Constantine Lignos, Erwin Chan, Mitchell P. Marcus, Charles Yang
A rule-based unsupervised morphology learning framework
In Working Notes of the 10th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2009, Corfu, Greece, September 30 - October 2, 2009. http://www.clef-campaign.org/2009/working_notes/CLEF2009WN-Contents.html
Emily Wang, Constantine Lignos, Ashish Vatsal and Brian Scassellati
Effects of head movement on perceptions of humanoid robot behavior
In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on human-robot interaction (HRI'06), Salt Lake City (Utah), 2-4 March 2006
BibTeX doi.acm Presentation slides (PDF)

Work History

Program Manager, Microsoft Auto, September 2006-July 2008: Worked on automotive speech recognition systems, including Ford Sync. Also worked with the Microsoft Research Speech Technology Group on CommuteUX.
Program Manager Intern, Microsoft Windows Mobile, June 2005-August 2005