About Me [ cv, bio ]
I am a Senior Computational Linguist and Team Leader at Language Computer Corporation in Richardson, Texas. My work at LCC focuses on how lightweight systems for computing forms of textual inference -- including textual entailment, textual contradiction, and forms of temporal and spatial inference -- can be used to enhance a user's experience with natural language search and information extraction tools. Other research interests include the development of computational models of dialogue for interactive question-answering systems, machine learning techniques for named entity recognition and answer-type detection, the automatic representation of topics, automatic question generation and paraphrase detection, and extractive summarization.

Journal Papers
2007
Andrew Hickl and Sanda Harabagiu. Submitted. Textual and Knowledge Entailment. Special Issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing. [ bibtex | pdf ]

2006
Sanda Harabagiu, Andrew Hickl, and Finley Lacatusu. 2007. Satisying Information Needs with Multi-Document Summaries. Special Issue of Information Processing and Management. [ bibtex | pdf ]

Conference Papers [ last updated on February 13, 2008 ]
2008
Jeremy Bensley and Andrew Hickl. 2008. Unsupervised Resource Creation for Textual Inference Applications. Proceedings of the 2008 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008). Marrakech, Morocco.

Kirk Roberts and Andrew Hickl. 2008. Scaling Answer Type Detection to Large Hierarchies. Proceedings of the 2008 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008). Marrakech, Morocco.

2007
Andrew Hickl, Kirk Roberts, Bryan Rink, Jeremy Bensley, Tobias Jungen, Ying Shi, and John Williams. 2007. Question Answering with LCC's Chaucer-2 at TREC 2007. Proceedings of the 2007 Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2007). Gaithersburg, MD. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Andrew Hickl and Jeremy Bensley.  2007.  A Discourse Commitment-based Framework for Recognizing Textual Entailment.  Proceedings of the ACL 2007 Workshop on Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment.  Prague. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Andrew Hickl, Kirk Roberts, and Finley Lacatusu.  2007.  A Machine Reading Approach to Update Summarization.  Proceedings of the 2007 Document Understanding Conference (DUC 2007).  Rochester, NY. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Andrew Hickl and Sanda Harabagiu. 2007. Machine Reading through Textual and Knowledge Entailment. Proceedings of the 2007 AAAI Spring Symposium on Machine Reading. Palo Alto, CA. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

2006
Andrew Hickl, John Williams, Jeremy Bensley, Kirk Roberts, Ying Shi, and Bryan Rink. 2006. Question Answering with LCC's Chaucer at TREC 2006. Proceedings of the 2006 Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2006). Gaithersburg, MD. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Sanda Harabagiu and Andrew Hickl. 2006. Using Scenario Knowledge in Open-Domain Question Answering. Proceedings of the Task-Focused Question-Answering and Summarization Workshop. Sydney, Australia. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Finley Lacatusu, Andrew Hickl, Kirk Roberts, Ying Shi, Jeremy Bensley, Patrick Wang, Bryan Rink, and Lara Taylor. 2006. GISTexter at DUC 2006: Multi-Strategy Multi-Document Summarization. Proceedings of the 2006 Document Understanding Conference (DUC 2006). New York, New York. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Andrew Hickl, Patrick Wang, John Lehmann, and Sanda Harabagiu. 2006. Ferret: Interactive Question-Answering for Real-World Research Environments. Proceedings of the 2006 COLING-ACL Interactive Presentations Session. Sydney, Australia. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Sanda Harabagiu and Andrew Hickl. 2006. Methods for Using Textual Entailment in Open-Domain Question Answering. Proceedings of COLING-ACL 2006. Sydney, Australia. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Sanda Harabagiu, Finley Lacatusu, and Andrew Hickl. 2006. Answering Complex Questions with Random Walk Models. Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2006). Seattle, WA. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Sanda Harabagiu, Andrew Hickl, and Finley Lacatusu. 2006. Negation, Contrast, and Contradiction in Text Processing. Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06). Boston, MA. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Andrew Hickl. 2006. Enhanced Interactive Question-Answering with Conditional Random Fields. Proceedings of the Workshop on Interactive Question Answering at HLT/NAACL-06. New York, NY. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Andrew Hickl, John Williams, Jeremy Bensley, Kirk Roberts, Bryan Rink, and Ying Shi. 2006. Recognizing Textual Entailment with LCC's Groundhog System. Proceedings of the Second PASCAL Recognizing Textual Entailment Challenge. Venice, Italy. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Finley Lacatusu, Andrew Hickl, and Sanda Harabagiu. 2006. The Impact of Question Decomposition on the Quality of Answer Summaries. Proceedings of the Seventh Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2006). Genoa, Italy. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Luke Nezda, Andrew Hickl, John Lehmann, and Sarmad Fayyaz. 2006. What in the world is a Shahab? Wide Coverage Named Entity Recognition in Arabic. Proceedings of the 2006 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2006). Genoa, Italy. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

2005
Finley Lacatusu, Andrew Hickl, Paul Aarseth, and Lara Taylor. 2005. LiteGISTexter at DUC 2005. Proceedings of the 2005 Document Understanding Conference (DUC 2005). Vancouver, BC. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

Sanda Harabagiu, Dan Moldovan, Mitchell Bowden, Christine Clark, Andrew Hickl, and Patrick Wang. 2005. Utilizing Two Question-Answering Systems at TREC 2005. Proceedings of the 2005 Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2005). Gaithersburg, MD. [ bibtex | pdf ]

Sanda Harabagiu, Andrew Hickl, John Lehmann. Experiments with Interactive Question-Answering.  Proceedings of the 2005 Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting (ACL 2005). Ann Arbor, MI. [ bibtex | pdf | ppt ]

2004
Finley Lacatusu, Andrew Hickl, Sanda Harabagiu, Luke Nezda. 2004. Lite-GISTexter at DUC 2004.  Proceedings of the 2004 Document Understanding Conference (DUC 2004).  Boston, MA. [ bibtex | pdf ]

Andrew Hickl, John Lehmann, John Williams and Sanda Harabagiu. 2004.  Experiments with Interactive Question-Answering in Complex Scenarios.  Proceedings of the Workshop on the Pragmatics of Question Answering at HLT-NAACL 2004.  Boston, MA. [ bibtex | pdf ]

Andrew Hickl and Lara Taylor.  2004. Causal Coherence and the Distribution of Epistemic Domains.  2004 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.  Boston, MA.

2002
Andrew Hickl. 2002.  Locative Inversion in Chishona:  Two types of inversion constructions.  Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics.  University of Ohio:  Athens, OH.

Conference Reviewing
ACL 2008, Columbus
COLING 2008, Manchester
ICJNLP 2008, Hyderabad
ACL 2007, Prague
HLT-NAACL 2007, Rochester
HLT-NAACL 2006, New York City
ACL-COLING 2006, Sydney
COLING 2004, Geneva

Positions Held
2005 - Present Team Leader / Senior Computational Linguist, Language Computer Corporation, Richardson, TX
2004 - 2005 Computational Linguist, Language Computer Corporation, Richardson, TX
2003 - 2004 Project Manager, Center for U.S. - Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA
1999 - 2000 Corporate Relations Intern, Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California / Aldea Communications, Carlsbad, CA
1998 - 2003 Teaching Assistant, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA

Education
2001 - 2003  PhD Student in Linguistics, University of California, San Diego
2001  MA, Linguistics, University of California, San Diego
1998  BA, Linguistics and Biology, Rice University, Houston, Texas