Agustín Gravano From 2003 to 2009 I was a Ph.D. student in the Spoken Language Processing Group at Columbia University, under the supervision of Prof. Julia Hirschberg. On January 2009 I successfully defended my dissertation, “Turn-Taking and Affirmative Cue Words in Task-Oriented Dialogue” (awarded «distinction»). Download my full CV (PDF file). E-mail: agusxx[at]xxcs.columbia.edu

Publications

• Spoken Language Processing

• A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Turn-yielding cues in task-oriented dialogue”, accepted for oral presentation at SigDial 2009. London, U.K., September 2009.
• A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Backchannel-inviting cues in task-oriented dialogue”, accepted for oral presentation at Interspeech 2009. Brighton, U.K., September 2009.
• A. Gravano, M. Jansche, M. Bacchiani, “Restoring punctuation and capitalization in transcribed speech”, in Proceedings of ICASSP 2009, pages 4741-4744. Taipei, Taiwan, April 2009.
• A. Nenkova, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “High frequency word entrainment in spoken dialogue”, in Proceedings of ACL/HLT 2008 (short paper), pages 169-172. Columbus, OH, June 2008.
• A. Gravano, S. Benus, J. Hirschberg, E. Sneed German, G. Ward, “The effect of contour type and epistemic modality on the assessment of speaker certainty”, in Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2008, pages 401-404. Campinas, Brazil, May 2008.
• J. Hirschberg, A. Gravano, A. Nenkova, E. Sneed, G. Ward, “Intonational overload: Uses of the downstepped (H* !H* L- L%) contour in read and spontaneous speech”, in Cole, Jennifer and Hualde, José I. (eds.). Laboratory Phonology 9, pages 455-482. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. December 2007.
• A. Gravano, S. Benus, J. Hirschberg, S. Mitchell, I. Vovsha, “Classification of discourse functions of affirmative words in spoken dialogue”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2007, pages 1613-1616. Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007.
• S. Benus, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Prosody, emotions, and... whatever”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2007, pages 2629-2632. Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007.
• S. Benus, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “The prosody of backchannels in American English”, in Proceedings of ICPhS 2007, pages 1065-1068. Saarbrücken, Germany, August 2007.
• A. Gravano, S. Benus, H. Chávez, J. Hirschberg, L. Wilcox, “On the role of context and prosody in the interpretation of okay”, in Proceedings of ACL 2007, pages 800-807. Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007.
• A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, “Effect of genre, speaker, and word class on the realization of given and new information”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2006, pages 557-560. Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006.
• R. Sarikaya, A. Gravano, Y. Gao, “Rapid language model development using external resources for new spoken dialog domains”, in Proceedings of ICASSP 2005, pages 573-576. Philadelphia, PA, March 2005.

• Graph Theory

• G. Durán, A. Gravano, R. McConnell, J. Spinrad, A. Tucker, “Polynomial time recognition of unit circular-arc graphs”, Journal of Algorithms, Vol. 58(1), pages 67-78, January 2006.
• G. Durán, A. Gravano, M. Groshaus, F. Protti, J. Szwarcfiter, “On a conjecture concerning Helly circle graphs”, Pesquisa Operacional, Vol. 23, pages 221-229, April 2003.
• A. Gravano, G. Durán, “The intersection between some subclasses of circular-arc and circle graphs”, Congressus Numerantium, Vol. 159, pages 183-192, December 2002.
• H. Czemerinski, G. Durán, A. Gravano, “Bouchet graphs: a generalization of circle graphs”, Congressus Numerantium, Vol. 155, pages 95-108, December 2002.
• A. Gravano, “Study of Problems, Properties and Algorithms for Circular-Arc and Circle Graphs” (in Spanish). Licenciatura Degree Thesis, University of Buenos Aires, July 2001. Supervisor: Prof. Guillermo Durán.

Teaching

• At Columbia University

• Spring 2006: Spoken Language Processing (CS4706) - Graduate Teaching Assistant. Extraordinary TA Award (conferred by The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University).
• Spring 2005: Spoken Language Processing (CS4706) - Graduate Teaching Assistant. Extraordinary TA Award (conferred by The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University).

• At the University of Buenos Aires

• August 2002 - July 2003: Programming Language Paradigms - Graduate Teaching Assistant
• March 2001 - July 2002: Algorithms and Data Structures II - Graduate Teaching Assistant
• March 1998 - March 2000: Algorithms and Data Structures I - Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

Selected Talks

• “A model of turn-taking in task-oriented dialogue”, at the LTI Seminar, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; February 2009.
• “A model of turn-taking in task-oriented dialogue”, at AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ. February 2009.
• “High frequency word entrainment in spoken dialogue”, at ACL/HLT 2008, Columbus, OH, June 2008.
• “The effect of contour type and epistemic modality on the assessment of speaker certainty”, at Speech Prosody 2008, Campinas, Brazil, May 2008.
• “Classification of discourse functions of affirmative words in spoken dialogue”, at Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007.
• “On the role of context and prosody in the interpretation of okay”, at ACL 2007, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007.
• “Effect of genre, speaker, and word class on the realization of given and new information”, at Interspeech 2006, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2006.
• “¿Por qué no habla mi computadora (todavía)?”, Charla de Borrachos, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 2006.
• “Downstepped contours in the given/new distinction”, at the Workshop on the Role of Prosody in Structuring Discourse, Berlin, Germany, October 2005.
• “The intersection between some subclasses of circular-arc and circle graphs”, at the 33rd Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, Boca Raton, FL, March 2002.
• “Course-assignment problem”, at the VII Latin American Summer Workshop on Operations Research (ELAVIO), Viña del Mar, Chile, January 2001.

Miscellanea

Last updated: 30 Jun 2009