Daniel Hewlett
Ph.D. Student, Research Assistant
Department of Computer Science
University of Arizona
Gould-Simpson Building
1040 E. 4th Street
Tucson, AZ 85721
Current
I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Arizona in September 2011 under Prof. Paul Cohen. I am now at Google in Mountain View.
Research
My primary areas of interest are Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Natural Language Processing. At the intersection of these fields is situated natural language learning, which is the subject of my current research. Our lab first developed Wubble World, an interactive online game world for children, to gather a corpus of linguistic interaction situated within a virtual environment. Now, we are extending this research into the real world via our Wubble Robot platform. Within language learning, specific interests include semantics and representation, the syntax/semantics interface, and learning by bootstrapping. My dissertation research involves developing a semantic representation for verb phrases that supports execution by a mobile robot.
Education
Before transferring to UA in Fall 2008, I completed an M.S. in Computer Science, and my first year as a Ph.D. student, at the University of Southern California. I attended the University of Maryland, College Park as an undergraduate in Computer Science (B.S.), Linguistics (B.A.), and Philosophy (B.A.).
Publications
Thesis
Daniel Hewlett. A Framework for Recognizing and Executing Verb Phrases. Ph.D. Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2011.
Conferences
Thomas J. Walsh, Daniel Hewlett, and Clayton T. Morrison. Blending Autonomous Exploration and Apprenticeship Learning. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2011). 2011. [in press]
Daniel Hewlett, Thomas J. Walsh, and Paul Cohen. Teaching and Executing Verb Phrases. Proceedings of the First Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL 2011). 2011. [in press]
Daniel Hewlett and Paul Cohen. Word Segmentation as General Chunking. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2011). 2011. [in press]
Daniel Hewlett and Paul Cohen. Fully Unsupervised Word Segmentation with BVE and MDL. Proceedings of The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-2011). 2011. [in press]
Daniel Hewlett and Paul Cohen. Artificial General Segmentation. Proceedings of The Third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-10). 2010. [pdf]
Daniel Hewlett and Paul Cohen. Bootstrap Voting Experts. Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09). 2009. [pdf]
Daniel Hewlett, Shane Hoversten, Wesley Kerr, Paul Cohen, and Yu-Han Chang. Wubble World. Proceedings of the Third Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE-07). 2007. [pdf]
Wesley Kerr, Shane Hoversten, Daniel Hewlett, Paul Cohen, Yu-Han Chang. Learning in Wubble World. Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Learning and Development (ICDL-07). 2007. [pdf]
Workshops and Symposia
Daniel Hewlett and Thomas J. Walsh and Paul Cohen. A Framework for Teaching and Executing Verb Phrases AAAI Spring Symposium 2011: Help Me Help You: Bridging the Gaps in Human-Agent Collaboration. 2011. [pdf]
Daniel Hewlett and Paul Cohen. Word Segmentation as General Chunking. Psychocomputational Models of Language Acquisition Workshop (PsychoCompLA 2009). 2009. [pdf]
Daniel Hewlett, Aditya Kalyanpur, Vladimir Kovlovski, Chris Halaschek-Wiener. Effective Natural Language Paraphrasing of Ontologies on the Semantic Web. Proceedings of the End User Semantic Web Interaction Workshop (ISWC-05). 2005.