Curriculum Vitae
Anton Leuski

Principal fields of interest

Interactive information access. Natural language understanding. Information retrieval, organization, and visualization. Human-computer interaction. Machine learning.

Education

Employment

Publications (journals)

1. Xuchen Yao, Emma Tosch, Grace Chen, Elnaz Nouri, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, Kenji Sagae, and David Traum. Creating conversational characters using question generation tools. Dialogue and Discourse, 3(2):125–146, 2012.
2. Anton Leuski and David Traum. NPCEditor: Creating virtual human dialogue using information retrieval techniques. AI Magazine, 32(2):42–56, 2011.
3. Anton Leuski and James Allan. Interactive information retrieval using clustering and spatial proximity. User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction (UMUAI), 14(2):259–288, June 2004. Winner of the 2004 James Chen Annual Award for Best Journal Article.
4. Anton Leuski, Chin Yew Lin, Liang Zhou, Ulrich Germann, Franz Josef Och, and Eduard Hovy. Cross-lingual C*ST*RD: English access to Hindi information. ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP), 2(3):245–269, September 2003.
5. Daqing He, Douglas W. Oard, Jianqiang Wang, Jun Luo, Dina Demner-Fushman, Kareem Darwish, Philip Resnik, Sanjeev Khudanpur, Michael Nossal, Michael Subotin, and Anton Leuski. Making MIRACLEs: Interactive translingual search for Cebuano and Hindi. ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP), 2(3):219–244, September 2003.
6. James Allan, Anton Leuski, Russell Swan, and Don Byrd. Evaluating combinations of ranked lists and visualizations of inter-document similarity. Information Processing and Management (IPM), 37:435–458, 2000.
7. Anton Leuski and James Allan. Strategy-based interactive cluster visualization for information retrieval. International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJODL), 3(2):170–184, 2000.

Publications (book chapters)

8. William Yang Wang, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, and David Traum. Improving spoken dialogue understanding using phonetic mixture models. In Cross-Disciplinary Advances in Applied Natural Language Processing: Issues and Approaches, chapter 15, pages 225–-238. IGI Global, Hershey, PA, 2012.

Publications (refereed conferences)

9. Anton Leuski, Carsten Eickhoff, James P. Ganis, and Victor Lavrenko. The BladeMistress corpus: From talk to action in virtual worlds. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Istanbul, Turkey, 2012.
10. Julia Campbell, Mark Core, Ron Artstein, Lindsay Armstrong, Arno Hartholt, Cyrus Wilson, Kallirroi Georgila, Fabrizio Morbini, Edward Haynes, Dave Gomboc, Mike Birch, Jonathan Bobrow, H. Chad Lane, Jillian Gerten, Anton Leuski, David Traum, Matthew Trimmer, Rich DiNinni, Matthew Bosack, Timothy Jones, Richard E. Clark, and Kenneth A. Yates. Developing INOTS to support interpersonal skills practice. In Proceedings of the Thirty-second Annual IEEE Aerospace Conference (IEEEAC), 2011.
11. David DeVault, Anton Leuski, and Kenji Sagae. An evaluation of alternative strategies for implementing dialogue policies using statistical classification and rules. In Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), pages 1341–1345, Chiang Mai, Thailand, Nov 2011.
12. David DeVault, Anton Leuski, and Kenji Sagae. Toward learning and evaluation of dialogue policies with text examples. In Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGDIAL Conference, pages 39–48, Jun 2011.
13. Elnaz Nouri, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, and David Traum. Augmenting conversational characters with generated question-answer pairs. In Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium on Question Generation, Nov 2011.
14. William Yang Wang, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, and David Traum. Improving spoken dialogue understanding using phonetic mixture models. In Proceedings of FLAIRS 24, May 2011. Finalist for Best Paper Award (9 finalists of 179 submissions).
15. Grace Chen, Emma Tosch, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, and David Traum. Evaluating conversational characters created through question generation. In Proceedings of FLAIRS 24, May 2011. Best poster award.
16. Dusan Jan, Eric Chance, Dinesh Rajpurohit, David DeVault, Anton Leuski, Jacki Morie, and David Traum. Checkpoint exercise: Training with virtual actors in virtual worlds. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA, pages 453–454, Sep 2011.
17. Priti Aggarwal, Kevin Feeley, Fabrizio Morbini, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, David Traum, and Julia Kim. Interactive characters for cultural training of small military units. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), pages 426–427, Reykjavik, Iceland, Sep 2011.
18. Anton Leuski and David Traum. Practical language processing for virtual humans. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-10), pages 1740–1747, July 2010. Winner of the 2010 IAAI Deployed Application Award.
19. Anton Leuski and David Traum. NPCEditor: A tool for building question-answering characters. In Proceedings of The Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Valletta, Malta, May 2010. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
20. William R. Swartout, David R. Traum, Ron Artstein, Dan Noren, Paul E. Debevec, Kerry Bronnenkant, Josh Williams, Anton Leuski, Shrikanth Narayanan, and Diane Piepol. Ada and Grace: Toward realistic and engaging virtual museum guides. In IVA'10: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, pages 286–300, 2010.
21. Dusan Jan, Antonio Roque, Anton Leuski, Jackie Morie, and David R. Traum. A virtual tour guide for virtual worlds. In IVA'09: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, pages 372–378, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009.
22. Arno Hartholt, Jonathan Gratch, Lori Weiss, Anton Leuski, Louis Philippe Morency, Stacy Marsella, Matt Liewer, Marcus Thiebaux, Prathibha Doraiswamy, and Andreas Tsiartas. At the virtual frontier: Introducing Gunslinger, a multi-character, mixed-reality, story-driven experience. In IVA'09: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, pages 500–501, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. Springer-Verlag.
23. Ron Artstein, Sudeep Gandhe, Jillian Gerten, Anton Leuski, and David R. Traum. Semi-formal evaluation of conversational characters. In Languages: From Formal to Natural, pages 22–35, 2009.
24. Ron Artstein, Jacob Cannon, Sudeep Gandhe, Jillian Gerten, Joe Henderer, Anton Leuski, and David Traum. Coherence of off-topic responses for a virtual character. In Proceedings of the 26th Army Science Conference, Orlando, Florida, USA, December 2008.
25. Sudeep Gandhe, David DeVault, Antonio Roque, Bilyana Martinovski, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, Jillian Gerten, and David Traum. From domain specification to virtual humans: An integrated approach to authoring tactical questioning characters. In Proceedings of Interspeech, Brisbane, Australia, September 2008.
26. Ron Artstein, Sudeep Gandhe, Anton Leuski, and David Traum. Field testing of an interactive question-answering character. In Proceedings of the ELRA workshop on evaluation, pages 36–40, Marrakech, Morocco, May 2008.
27. Anton Leuski and David Traum. A statistical approach for text processing in virtual humans. In Proceedings of the 26th Army Science Conference, Orlando, Florida, USA, December 2008.
28. Sudeep Gandhe, David DeVault, Antonio Roque, Bilyana Martinovski, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, Jillian Gerten, and David Traum. From domain specification to virtual humans: An integrated approach to authoring tactical questioning characters. In Proceedings of Interspeech Conference, 2008.
29. Ron Artstein, Sudeep Gandhe, Anton Leuski, and David Traum. Field testing of an interactive question-answering character. In Proceedings ELRA Workshop on Evaluation, pages 36–40, Marrakech, Morocco, May 2008.
30. David Traum, Antonio Roque, Anton Leuski, Panayiotis Georgiou, Jillian Gerten, Bilyana Martinovski, Shrikanth Narayanan, Susan Robinson, and Ashish Vaswani. Hassan: A virtual human for tactical questioning. In Proceedings of the 8th annual SIGDIAL Conference, pages 71–74, September 2007.
31. Hua Ai, Antonio Roque, Anton Leuski, and David Traum. Using information state to improve dialogue move identification in a spoken dialogue system. In Proceedings of Interspeech, Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007.
32. Patrick Kenny, Thomas D. Parsons, Jonathan Gratch, Anton Leuski, and Albert A. Rizzo. Virtual patients for clinical therapist skills training. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, pages 197–210, Paris, France, September 2007.
33. Anton Leuski, Jarrell Pair, David Traum, Peter J. McNerney, Panayiotis Georgiou, and Ronakkumar Patel. How to talk to a hologram. In Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI'06), pages 360–362, Sydney, Australia, January 2006. ACM Press New York, NY, USA.
34. Anton Leuski and Victor Lavrenko. Tracking dragon-hunters with language models. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), pages 698–707, Arlington, VA, November 2006. ACM Press. NY, USA.
35. Ronakkumar Patel, Anton Leuski, and David Traum. Dealing with out of domain questions in virtual characters. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA'06), Marina del Rey, CA, August 2006.
36. Anton Leuski, Ronakkumar Patel, David Traum, and Brandon Kennedy. Building effective question answering characters. In Proceedings of the 7th annual SIGDIAL Conference, Sydney, Australia, July 2006.
37. Antonio Roque, Anton Leuski, Vivek Rangarajan, Susan Robinson, Ashish Vaswani, Shri Narayanan, and David Traum. Radiobot-cff: A spoken dialogue system for military training. In Proceedings of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006.
38. Anton Leuski, Brandon Kennedy, Ronakkumar Patel, and David Traum. Asking questions to limited domain virtual characters: how good does speech recognition have to be?. In Proceedings of the 25th Army Science Conference, 2006.
39. Rahul Bhagat, Anton Leuski, and Eduard Hovy. Statistical shallow semantic parsing despite little training data. In Proceedings of 9th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (ACL/SIGPARSE'05), Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 2005.
40. David Traum, William Swartout, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Patrick Kenney, Eduard Hovy, Shri Narayanan, Ed Fast, Bilyana Martinovski, Rahul Bhagat, Susan Robinson, Andrew Marshall, Dagen Wang, Sudeep Gandhe, and Anton Leuski. Dealing with doctors: Virtual humans for non-team interaction training. In Proceedings of the 6th annual SIGDIAL Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2005.
41. Anton Leuski. Context features in email archives. In Proceedings of IRiX workshop at SIGIR'05, August 2005.
42. Anton Leuski. Email is a stage: discovering people roles from email archives. In Proceedings of 27th annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'04), pages 502–503, Sheffield, United Kingdom, 2004. ACM Press. NY, USA.
43. Sudeep Gandhe, Andrew Gordon, Anton Leuski, David Traum, and Douglas W. Oard. First steps toward linking dialogues: Mediating between free-text questions and pre-recorded video answers. In Proceedings of the 24th Army Science Conference, Orlando, Florida, USA, December 2004.
44. Douglas W. Oard, Anton Leuski, and Stuart Stubblebine. Protecting the privacy of observable behavior in distributed recommender systems. In Proceedings of SIGIR'03 Workshop on Implicit Measures of User Interests and Preferences, August 2003.
45. Anton Leuski, Chin Yew Lin, and Eduard Hovy. iNeATS: Interactive multi-document summarization. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2003), pages 125–128, Sapporo, Japan, July 2003.
46. Douglas W. Oard and Anton Leuski. Searching recorded speech based on the temporal extent of topic labels. In Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Multimedia Knowledge Management, Palo Alto, CA, March 2003.
47. Douglas W. Oard, David Doermann, Bonnie Dorr, Daqing He, Philip Resnik, Amy Weinberg, William Byrne, Sanjeev Khudanpur, David Yarowsky, Anton Leuski, Philipp Koehn, and Kevin Knight. Desparately seeking Cebuano. In Proceedings of the 3rd Human Language Technology Conference (HLT'03), pages 76–78, Edmonton, Canada, May 2003.
48. Anton Leuski, Douglas W. Oard, and Rahul Bhagat. eArchivarius: Accessing collections of electronic mail. In Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages 468–469, Toronto, Canada, July 2003. ACM Press.
49. Anton Leuski and James Allan. Improving realism of topic tracking evaluation. In Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages 89–96, Tampere, Finland, August 11-15, 2002. ACM Press.
50. Anton Leuski. Evaluating document clustering for interactive information retrieval. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'01), pages 41–48, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, November 5-10, 2001. ACM Press.
51. David Frey, Rahul Gupta, Vikas Khandelwal, Victor Lavrenko, Anton Leuski, and James Allan. Monitoring the news: a TDT demonstration system. In Proceedings of the First International Human Language Technologies Conference (HLT'01), pages 351–355, San Diego, California, USA, March 18-21, 2001. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.
52. Anton Leuski and James Allan. Lighthouse: showing the way to relevant information. In Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis'00), pages 125–130, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, October 9-10, 2000. IEEE Computer Society.
53. Anton Leuski and James Allan. Improving interactive retrieval by combining ranked lists and clustering. In Proceedings of RIAO'2000, pages 665–681, Paris, France, April 12-14, 2000. C.I.D., Paris, France.
54. Anton Leuski. Relevance and reinforcement in interactive browsing. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'00), pages 119–126, McLean, Virginia, USA, November 6-11, 2000. ACM Press.
55. Anton Leuski and James Allan. Visual interactions with multidimensional ranked list. In Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages 353–354, Melbourne, Australia, August 24-28, 1998. ACM Press.
56. Anton Leuski and James Allan. Evaluating a visual navigation system for a digital library. In Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL'98), pages 535–554, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, September 21–23, 1998. Springer.

Publications (other)

57. Anton Leuski. Interactive Information Organization: Techniques and Evaluation. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, May 2001.
58. Anton Leuski and James Allan. Details of Lighthouse. Technical Report IR-212, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2000.
59. Anton Leuski. Evaluating a visual presentation of retrieved documents. Technical Report IR-159, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999.
60. Anton Leuski. Studying the usability of relevant proximity ranking. Technical Report IR-175, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999.
61. Anton Leuski and James Allan. The best of both worlds: Combining ranked list and clustering. Technical Report IR-172, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1999.
62. James Allan, Anton Leuski, and Russel Swan. Interactive cluster visualization for Information Retrieval. Technical Report IR-116, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1997.
63. Anton Leuski and W. Bruce Croft. An evaluation of techniques for clustering search results. Technical Report IR-76, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1996.
64. Anton Leuski and Paul E. Utgoff. What a neural network can learn about Othello. Technical Report TR 96-10, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1996.
65. Anton Leuski. Learning of position evaluation in the game of Othello. Technical Report TR 95–23, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1995.

Professional Awards

1. Best Poster Award, May 2011
2. Finalist for Best Paper Award (9 finalists of 179 submission), May 2011
3. Second Place at the Federal Virtual World Challenge, March 2011
4. IAAI Deployed Application Award, July 2010
5. James Chen Annual Award for Best Journal Article, June 2004

Professional activities

Co-organized, co-chaired, and conducted ICT workshop on Human-Agent Social Interaction in Online Virtual Worlds. February 23–25, 2011.

Co-organized SEMDIAL 2011. Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. September 21–23, 2011

Co-organized and co-chaired Workshop on New Directions For IR Evaluation at SIGIR 2004.

Invited talks at the AT&T Shannon Laboratory (08/1998), University of Maryland (06/2005 and 11/2006), FX-PAL (04/2007).

Reviewed papers for CG&A, TOIS, IP&M, JAIR, and TWEB journals

Program committee member at AAAI 2000, 2002, KDD 2000, CIKM 2001, InfoVis 2002, KDIR 2011, SIGIR 2001-2012, NAACL-HLT 2012, SIGDIAL 2012.

Teaching experience

Co-developed and co-taught CSCI 599, Applications of Natural Language Processing: Information Retrieval with Donald Metzler at the USC Computer Science Department in Spring 2012.

Guest lectures at the USC Computer Science Department for the Natural Language Processing (Spring 2008 and 2009, prof. Edward Hovy), Dialog Systems (Fall 2005, prof. David Traum), and Introduction to AI (Fall 2008, prof. Sven Koenig) courses.

Assisted in teaching courses at the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Course titles: “Programming and Data Structures” (Fall 1992), “Programming Languages” (Spring 1993), and “Assembler Language” (Fall 1993 and Spring 1994). Duties included lab supervision, holding office hours, home assignment preparation, exam and homework grading.

Assisted in teaching basic programming course at Moscow State University (Spring and Summer 1992). Duties included lab supervision, tutoring students in C and Pascal programming languages, developing educational software.