N.B.: I am now at Convera, Inc., after having done a stint at UMBC

Coursework:

Spring 2004: Instructor NMSU Upward Bound Computers I & III

Fall 2003: TA for CS 110: Computer Literacy

Fall 2002: TA for CS 571: Semantics of Programming Languages
"Can you say Lambda Calculus?"
Supplemental Course Info

Spring 2002: Taught CS 167/467: C Programming
A fate worse than Hades (e.g., teaching pointers to non-majors)!

Research Interests:

Computational Linguistics, aka Natural Language Processing (NLP):
Statistical Language Learning
Lexical Semantics
Word Sense Disambiguation
ex: OpenMind word game

Artificial Intelligence
Bayesian Networks
Machine Learning
Commonsense Knowledge Representation
ex: OpenCyc

Dissertation Work:

Thesis:  Empirical Acquisition of Conceptual Distinctions via Dictionary Definitions

Review of literature:  Representation, Acquisition and Utilization of Lexical Knowledge

Advisor: Janyce Wiebe

Published Papers:

O'Hara, Tom, Stefano Bertolo, Michael Witbrock, Bjørn Aldag, Kathy Panton, Dave Schneider, Nancy Salay, and Jon Curtis (2004), "Inferring parts of speech for lexical mappings via the Cyc KB", in Proc. 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-04), Geneva, August 2004. [PDF, 129 KB]

O'Hara, Tom, Rebecca Bruce, Jeff Donner, and Janyce Wiebe (2004), "Class-based Collocations for Word-Sense Disambiguation", in Proc. Senseval 3 Workshop on Evaluation of Systems for the Semantic Analysis of Text, Barcelona, 25-26 July 2004. [PDF, 72 KB]

O'Hara, Tom, and Janyce Wiebe (2003), "Preposition Semantic Classification via Treebank and FrameNet", in Proc. Conference on Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-03), Edmonton, 30 - 31 May 2003. [PDF, 70 KB]

O'Hara, Tom, and Janyce Wiebe (2003), "Classifying functional relations in Factotum via WordNet hypernym associations", in Proc. Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing-2003). [PDF, 153 KB]

O'Hara, Tom, Nancy Salay, Michael Witbrock, Dave Schneider, Bjoern Aldag, Stefano Bertolo, Kathy Panton, Fritz Lehmann, Matt Smith, David Baxter, Jon Curtis, and Peter Wagner (2003), "Inducing criteria for mass noun lexical mappings using the Cyc KB, and its extension to WordNet", in Proc. Fifth International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS-5). [PDF, 161 KB]
How to reproduce the experiments: Scripts

O'Hara, Tom, Janyce Wiebe, and Rebecca Bruce (2000), "Selecting Decomposable Models for Word-sense Disambiguation: The grling-sdm System", Computers and the Humanities 34 (1-2): 159-164, Special Issue on SENSEVAL.

Wiebe, Janyce, Rebecca Bruce, and Tom O'Hara (1999), "Development and Use of a Gold Standard Data Set for Subjectivity Classifications", Proc. 37th Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL-99), June 23-26, University of Maryland, pp. 246-253. [postscript, 349 KB]

Wiebe, Janyce, Tom O'Hara, Thorsten Öhrström-Sandgren, and Kenneth McKeever (1998), "An Empirical Approach to Temporal Reference Resolution", Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 9: 247-293

O'Hara, Tom, Kavi Mahesh, and Sergei Nirenburg (1998), "Lexical Acquisition with WordNet and the Mikrokosmos Ontology", Usage of WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems, Coling-ACL '98 Workshop, August 16, 1998, University of Montreal. [postscript, 339 KB]

Wiebe, Janyce, Tom O'Hara, and Rebecca Bruce (1998), "Constructing Bayesian Networks from WordNet for Word-Sense Disambiguation: Representational and Processing Issues", Usage of WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems, Coling-ACL '98 Workshop, August 16, 1998, University of Montreal. [postscript, 365 KB]

Wiebe, Janyce, Tom O'Hara, Ken McKeever, and Thorsten Öhrström-Sandgren (1997), "An Empirical Approach to Temporal Reference Resolution", in Proceedings of 2nd Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP2), August 1-2, 1997, Providence, Rhode Island.[postscript, 375 KB]

Poster papers:

O'Hara, Tom, and Janyce Wiebe (2004), "Empirical Acquisition of Differentiating Relations from Definitions", in Proc. COLING Workshop on Enhancing and Using Electronic Dictionaries, Poster Session, Geneva, 29 August 2004. [PDF, 93 KB]

O'Hara, Tom, Michael Witbrock, Bjørn Aldag, Stefano Bertolo, Nancy Salay, Jon Curtis, and Kathy Panton (2003), "Inducing criteria for lexicalization parts of speech using the Cyc KB", in Proc. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), Poster Session, Acapulco, August 12-15, 2003. [PDF, 25 KB]

O'Hara, Tom (1998), "Empirical Acquisition of Word-Sense Distinctions", in Proceedings of AAAI-98, SIGART Doctoral Consortium, July 26-30, 1998, Madison, Wisconsin. [postscript, 129 KB]

Unpublished papers:

O.Hara, Tom (2005). Empirical acquisition of conceptual distinctions via dictionary definitions, Ph.D. thesis, New Mexico State University. [PDF, 529 KB]

O'Hara, Tom, and Janyce Wiebe (2002), "Classifying preposition semantic roles using class-based lexical associations", Technical Report CS-2002-013, Computer Science Department, New Mexico State University. [PDF, 128 KB]

O'Hara, Tom, Janyce Wiebe, Karen Payne (1997) "Instructions for Temporal Annotation of Scheduling Dialogs", Technical Report MCCS-97-308, Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM. [postscript, 137 KB]

O'Hara, Tom (1992), Tempus: A Task-Oriented system for Temporal Analysis and Reasoning, Master's thesis, East Stroudsburg University. (compressed postscript, 130 KB]

Project Information:

Probabilistic Classifiers for Natural Language Processing:  GraphLing

Temporal and Speech Act Resolution Discourse Processor: Artwork

Free software (in cost & in the GNU sense):

CWord, the Application: cword

Drivers for Orchid SoundWave32 (Windows 95 and Windows NT): sw32

Miscellaneous:

A neat clock applet: current time

My resume (PDF, 16 KB)

Links of Interest:

New Mexico State Defense Force: NMSDF

BBC News in Spanish: BBC Mundo

A most useful dictionary lookup tool: One Look

UT Austin's online map site: Perry-Castaeda Library Map Collection

Correspondence:

Comments (bypasses mail filter) and Complaints (contributions to /dev/null): tomohara @ cs.nmsu.edu