Robert Munro

/ Rob Munro

Research

I work in computational linguistics, language documentation and probabilities in linguistic theory, especially in the application to social development. Since 2007 I have been a Graduate Fellow at Stanford University.

Selected publications, reviews & presentations

2012

Munro, Robert, Lucky Gunasekara, Stephanie Nevins, Lalith Polepeddi and Evan Rosen. 2012. Tracking Epidemics with Natural Language Processing and Crowdsourcing. Spring Symposium for Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Stanford.

Munro, Robert, Rainer Ludwig, Uli Sauerland and David Fleck. 2012. Reported Speech in Matses: perspective persistence and evidential narratives. International Journal of American Linguistics. 78:1, 41-75.

Munro, Robert. 2012 (to appear). From Big Data to Small Languages: Communication and Information Processing in a Newly Connected World. Global Health & Innovation Conference. Unite For Sight, Yale.

2011

Munro, Robert. 2011. Tracking Epidemics Through Crowdsourcing and Natural Language Processing. International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM). Geneva.

Munro, Robert, Eethar Al-Hassan, Autumn Albers, George Chamales, Lucky Gunasekara, Pooja Desai, Dan Lipsitt, Stephanie Nevins, Brady Page, Lalith Polepeddi, Evan Rosen, Victoria Sahakian, Lu Zhang, Nathan Wolfe. 2011. EpidemicIQ: Building the world's immune system. CrowdConf, San Francisco.

Munro, Robert. 2011. Big Impacts from Small Messages: processing communications in less resourced languages. Invited Talk. Microsoft Research, Redmond.

Munro, Robert. 2011. Linguistics in a Connected World. Invited Talk, Fieldwork Forum. University Of California, Berkeley.

Munro, Robert. 2011. Extracting Microbial Threats From Big Data. Strata. O'Reilly, NY.

Munro, Robert and Hal Tily. 2011. The Start of the Art: Introduction to the Workshop on Crowdsourcing Technologies for Language and Cognition Studies. Crowdsourcing Technologies for Language and Cognition Studies, Boulder.

Lewis, Will, Robert Munro and Stephan Vogel. 2011. Crisis MT: Developing A Cookbook for MT in Crisis Situations Annual Workshop on Machine Translation, EMNLP, Edinburgh.

Munro, Robert. 2011 Subword and spatiotemporal models for identifying actionable information in Haitian Kreyol. Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2011), Portland.

Munro, Robert. 2011. How we talk to the world and how sometimes it listens. The Human Computer Interaction Group, Seminar Series, Stanford.

Munro, Robert. 2011. Changing the way we communicate. Crowdsourcing Work Meetup, San Francisco.

2010

Munro, Robert. 2010. Crowdsourced translation for emergency response in Haiti: the global collaboration of local knowledge. (Keynote) AMTA Workshop on Collaborative Crowdsourcing for Translation. Denver, Colorado.

Munro, Robert. 2010. Processing digital communications in less-resourced African languages. 33rd AFSAAP conference. Melbourne, Australia.

Munro, Robert. 2010. Addressing the crisis information bottleneck through crowdsourcing & machine-learning. (Ignite talk) International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM). Boston.
Presentation (video)

Munro, Robert. 2010. Leveraging machine-learning and crowdsourcing to process text messages in the world's less-resourced languages. (Invited talks).
Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society Seminar Series. University of California, Berkeley. Presentation (video)
and
ARC CS PIC Invited Speaker Series. IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose .

Munro, Robert. 2010. Crowdsourced translation for emergency response and beyond. NSF Workshop on crowdsourcing and translation, University of Maryland.
Slides

Munro, Robert and Christopher Manning. 2010. Subword Variation in Text Message Classification. Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2010), Los Angeles, CA.

Munro, Robert, Steven Bethard, Victor Kuperman, Vicky Tzuyin Lai, Robin Melnick, Christopher Potts, Tyler Schnoebelen and Harry Tily. 2010. Crowdsourcing and language studies: the new generation of linguistic data. Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, Los Angeles, CA.

Munro, Robert. 2010. Haiti emergency response: the power of crowdsourcing and SMS. Relief 2.0 in Haiti, Stanford, CA.

Munro, Robert. 2010. Natural Language Processing for Social Development. The Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT) Seminar Series, Latrobe University, Melbourne.

Munro, Robert. 2010. SMS Emergency Response in Haiti. Aid and Relief for Global Disasters, Meeting of the Association of Clinical Faculty (ACF), University of California, San Francisco.

2009

Munro, Robert. 2009. Amazon Mechanical Turk and the generation of new linguistic data. Stanford Seminar on Psycholinguistics, Stanford, CA.
Slides

Munro, Robert. 2009. Reported Speech and Perspective Rigidity in Matses. The 10th Stanford Semantics Fest, Stanford, CA.
[abstract]

2007-2008

I spent most of 2006 and 2007 doing non-research activities, like cycling across East and Southern Africa, and working for the Environmental Foundation for Africa in Sierra Leone, the UN Refugee Agency in Liberia, and for Working Software based out of Melbourne. So I had a break from publishing, other than compiling the Annual Report for the Environmental Foundation for Africa.

2006

Munro, Robert. 2006. Current design issues for digital archives: architectures supporting value-adding access via a user's preferred language(s) and granularity of materials. The Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT 2006), Washington DC

Munro, Robert. 2006. Multilingual metadata: between translation and coexistent annotations. Proceedings of the 2006 ELAP Workshop on Meaning and Translation in Language Documentation documentation. SOAS, London. (abstract only)

2005

Munro, Robert. 2005. The digital skills of language documentation. In Peter K. Austin (ed) Language Documentation and Description Volume 3. London: SOAS
Journal: http://www.hrelp.org/publications/papers/volume3/

Munro, Robert and David Nathan. 2005. Introducing the ELAR information system architecture. The Third meeting of the Digital Endangered Languages and Music Archive Network (DELAMAN III), Austin.
Slides

Munro, Robert and David Nathan. 2005. Towards portability and interoperability for linguistic annotation and language-specific ontologies, Proceedings of the E-MELD Workshop on Linguistic Ontologies and Data Categories for Language Resources (E-MELD 2005) Boston.
Slides

Munro, Robert. 2005. The certainty of chance: Review of Probabilistic Linguistics, Bod, R., Hay, J. and Jannedy, S. (eds). 2003. Linguistics and the Human Sciences Vol 1, 2.

Austin, Peter K., Robert Munro and David Nathan. 2005. Archives, linguists, and language speakers. The annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Oakland, California.

Wynne, John and Robert Munro. 2005. Hearing Voices: speakers / languages. The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, SOAS, London. [Interactive multimedia production]
To purchase see: http://www.hrelp.org/publications/multimedia/

2004

Munro, Robert. 2004. Digital skills and obligations: is language documentation a new ICT discipline? Proceedings of the 2004 ELAP Workshop on Multidisciplinary approaches to language documentation. SOAS, London. (abstract only)

Munro, Robert. 2004. Gradational modelling of functional categories. Presentation given as part of the ELAP-ELAR research seminar series. SOAS, London.

Munro, Robert. 2004. A Probabilistic Representation of Systemic Functional Grammar. The 31st International Systemic Functional Congress (ISFC31). Kyoto.
Slides

Munro, Robert and Sanjay Chawla. 2004. An Integrated Approach to Mining Data Streams, TR-548, School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney.

Munro, Robert and Sanjay Chawla. 2004. Complex Spatial Relationships, TR-539, School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney.

Arunasalam, Bavani, Sanjay Chawla, Pei Sun, Robert Munro. 2004. Mining Complex Relationships in the SDSS SkyServer Spatial Database. Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC04), IEEE Computer Society, Hong Kong

2003

Munro, Robert, Sanjay Chawla and Pei Sun. 2003. Complex Spatial Relationships, Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM2003) Florida.

Munro, Robert. 2003. Seneschal: classification and analysis in supervised mixture-modelling, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS'03) IOS Press, Melbourne

Munro, Robert and Daren Ler. 2003. Meta-Learning Orthographic and Contextual Models for Language Independent Named Entity Recognition. Proceedings of CoNLL-2003, Canada,

Munro, Robert. 2003. A queuing-theory model of word frequency distributions, Proceedings of the First Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTW'03), Melbourne

Munro, Robert. 2003. Towards the Computational Inference and Application of a Functional Grammar, (honours thesis). Department of English and School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney

Munro, Robert. 2003. Classification and analysis in supervised mixture-modelling, TR-536, School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney