M.S. Computer Science,
State University of New York at Stony Brook, December 2008
B.S. Computer Science (minor in History),
State University of New York at Binghamton, May 2006

Hi! I'm Diane and I am an Associate Research Engineer in the Natural Language Processing and Speech group in Research and Development at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey.

Research

My research interests are Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Information Retrieval and Extraction.

At ETS, I am the lead developer on the TextEvaluator (formerly SourceRater) project. Through various sub-projects, I also contribute to e-rater and SpeechRater.

At Stony Brook, I worked with Professor Amanda Stent in the HCI Lab. For my thesis, I developed a Java-based NLP/Machine Learning tool that aims to help students, both native and non-native speakers of English, improve their writing. You can read my thesis, if you'd like.

Over the summer of 2008, I contributed my IR/IE/ML/NLP skills to the PLOG project, as overseen by Professors Stent and Rob Johnson, and Mike Hart. I made recommendations on NLP tools for the project and worked on a section known as Affinity-Based Access Control (ABAC), in which blog entries are only shared with others who have a common interest in the entry's topic.

In the summer of 2007, I participated in a program called the Data Sciences Summer Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I worked on a project that explored the Virtual Web as a finite-state graph. A presentation on my work can be found below.

Teaching

I was an Adjunct Instructor at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury for three academic years. The courses I taught were:

Publications, Presentations, etc.

[To appear] Cahill, A., Madnani, N., Tetreault, J., and Napolitano, D. (2013, June). Robust Systems for Preposition Error Correction Using Wikipedia Revisions. Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Atlanta, GA.

[To appear] Sheehan, K.M., Flor, M., and Napolitano, D. (2013, June). A Two-Stage Approach for Generating Unbiased Estimates of Text Complexity. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility (NLP4ITA), Atlanta, GA.

Sheehan, K.M., Kostin, I., and Napolitano, D. (2012, April). SourceRater: An automated approach for generating text complexity classifications aligned with the Common Core Standards. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), Vancouver, BC.

Sheehan, K.M., Kostin, I., and Napolitano, D. (2012, April). SourceRater: Helping Teachers and Test Developers Determine the Difficulty of Text for Instruction and Assessment. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), Vancouver, BC.

Napolitano, Diane M. and Amanda Stent, "TechWriter: An Evolving System for Writing Assistance for Advanced Learners of English'". CALICO Journal 26, no. 3 (May 2009): 611-625. (link) (E-mail me for full version)

Diane M. Napolitano and Amanda Stent. TechWriter: An individualized approach to writing assistance and improvement. Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) workshop, "Automatic Analysis of Learner Language". 2008. (abstract) (poster)

Here is the presentation on my work at the University of Illinois that I gave to my reading group.

Activities and Affiliations

I am a member of the ACLU, the Sierra Club, and an ARPA level member of the host of this website, a.k.a. the "PBS of the Internet".

I was the founding Vice-President and Webmaster of Women in Computer Science at Stony Brook, and I used to regularly attend both LUGSB and SBCS meetings. When I was an undergrad at Binghamton, I was a representative on the Student Assembly and was on the Rules Committee as both Vice-Chair and Chair.

My primary OS since 1999 has been some variant of UNIX: first Slackware for about nine years, then Debian for four, and now I use Mac OS. At work I use Ubuntu and (for now) a mix of CentOS and RedHat Enterprise Linux.

I probably spend most of my free time listening to music, and you can get a good feel for my (excellent :) ) musical taste from my last.fm account. When possible, I spend time outside the house playing board games, in one of the five boroughs, or going on hikes.