Some of the related projects I work/worked on, that are funded by LEAD intramural grants:
From August 2015, I am a post-doctoral researcher at the LEAD graduate school, University of Tübingen.
From October 2012 to July 2015, I was a Doctoral student at the LEAD graduate school, University of Tübingen.
From April 2011 - July 2013, I was a PhD student and Early Stage Researcher in CLARA - an Initial Training Network (ITN) financed under the Marie Curie Actions financed by the European Commission Framework Program 7 (EC-FP7).
Prior to joining CLARA, I was a Search Engine Developer at iBloom Technologies. Co-designed and developed the question-answering and forum search engine for their products "answerica" and "hello expert" (2010-11).
In 2007-09, I worked in developing methods for Machine Transliteration and Text input for Indian languages (worked for a masters thesis followed by a few months at Microsoft India) .
(In the previous incarnation, I was a software developer at Tata Consultancy Services between 2005-2006.)Teaching Experience:
* Co-taught a Hauptseminar Computational Approaches to Text Simplification, along with Dr Detmar Meurers, at the University of Tuebingen (Summer Semester 2013)
* Co-taught a Hauptseminar “Analyzing complexity and text simplification: Connecting linguistics, processing, and applications“, at the University of Tuebingen, along with Dr Detmar Meurers, during the Winter semester 2011-2012.
* Teaching Assistant for Information Retrieval and Extraction course at IIIT-H, Fall 2007.
Current Work: Analyzing text complexity, Text simplification, Proficiency Assessment/Classification, Native Language Identification.
Broad Interests: NLP for educational applications, Multi-lingual information processing and retrieval, Technology for Indian languages (esp. Transliteration based text input), applied Machine Learning and ICT for development.
PhD in Computational Linguistics, Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen, Germany -2015
Masters degree in Computer Science & Engineering (M.S.) from IIIT-H, India. - 2009
(As a legacy from a previous incarnation, I also hold a Bachelors Degree (B.E.) in Electronics & Communication Engineering - 2005).
* Analyzing Text Complexity and Text Simplification: Connecting Linguistics, Processing and Educational Applications. Sowmya Vajjala Balakrishna. PhD Dissertation, Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen, 2015.(PDF)
* A Readable Read: Automatic Assessment of Language Learning Materials based on Linguistic Complexity. Ildikó Pilán, Sowmya Vajjala and Elena Volodina. Won best poster award at CICLing 2015 (pdf on arXiv)
2014* Automatic CEFR Level Prediction for Estonian Learner Text, Sowmya Vajjala and Kaidi Lõo, In Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on NLP for computer-assisted language learning (NLP4CALL), Uppsala, Sweden. November 2014. pages 113-127. (paper)
* On assessing the reading level of individual sentences for text simplification , Sowmya Vajjala and Detmar Meurers, In Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2014. pages 288-297. (paper, poster).
* Exploring Measures of "Readability" for Spoken Language: Analyzing linguistic features of subtitles to identify age-specific TV programs, Sowmya Vajjala and Detmar Meurers, In Proceedings of PITR workshop, EACL 2014, pages 21-29. (paper, slides, poster)
* Readability Assessment for Text Simplification: From Analyzing Documents to Identifying Sentential Simplifications, Sowmya Vajjala and Detmar Meurers, In: François, Thomas and Delphine Bernhard (eds.), Recent Advances in Automatic Readability Assessment and Text Simplification. Special issue of International Journal of Applied Linguistics 165:2. 2014. (pp. 194-222). (Journal link, pdf)
2013* On The Applicability of Readability Models to Web Texts, Sowmya Vajjala and Detmar Meurers, In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations (PITR), 2013. (paper, slides, poster)
* Role of Morpho-Syntactic Features in Estonian Proficiency Classification , Sowmya Vajjala and Kaidi Lõo, In Proceedings of the 8th workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications(BEA8), Association for Computational Linguistics, 2013. (paper. Presented again at the student poster session of Machine Learning Summer School, MLSS2013.)
* Combining Shallow and Linguistically Motivated Features in Native Language Identification , Serhiy Bykh, Sowmya Vajjala, Julia Krivanek and Detmar Meurers, In Proceedings of the 8th workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications(BEA8), Association for Computational Linguistics, 2013. (NLI Shared Task 2013 paper. Link here).
2012* Readability classification for German using Lexical, Syntactic and Morphological features, Julia Hancke, Sowmya Vajjala and Detmar Meurers, In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING) 2012.(paper, slides)
* The study of effect of length in morphological segmentation of agglutinative languages,Loganathan Ramasamy, Zdenek Zabokrtsky and Sowmya Vajjala, In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multilingual Modeling, ACL-2012, Jeju, Republic of Korea. Association for Computational Linguistics. (paper)
* On Improving the Accuracy of Readability Classification using Insights from Second Language Acquisition, Sowmya Vajjala and Detmar Meurers, Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA7), Association for Computational Linguistics. 2012. (paper.)
2011* Challenges in Designing Input Method Editors for Indian Languages: The Role of Word-Origin and Context,Umair Z. Ahmed, Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury and Sowmya VB, In proceedings of the workshop on advances in text input methods, IJCNLP-2011 (paper)
2010* Resource Creation for Training and Testing of Transliteration Systems for Indian Languages, Sowmya V.B, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali, Animesh Mukherjee and Anupam Basu., In Proceedings of LREC-2010, Malta.(paper)
2009* Text input methods for Indian languages, Sowmya V.B, MS Thesis, 2009,IIIT-H, India.(thesis pdf)
* Transliteration based text input for Telugu, Sowmya V.B. and Vasudeva Varma. Computer Processing of Oriental Languages-Language Technology for the Knowledge-based Economy. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 5459, 2009, pp 122-132 . (paper)
2008* Design and Evaluation of Soft keyboards for Telugu, Sowmya V.B. and Vasudeva Varma, In Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), 2008.(paper)
* One of the founders, admin and a regular contributor to pustakam.net - A Telugu website dedicated to the world of books.
* I translated Satyajit Ray's "Our films, their films" from English to Telugu (Pub: Navatarangam Film Studies, 2011). The book can be purchased here.
* More recently, I translated a Telugu autobiography "Nirjana Varadhi" (written by Kondapalli Koteswaramma) into English. This translation, titled "The Sharp Knife of Memory" is published by Zubaan Books and is available for online purchase from Zubaan books as well as other online bookstores.
* My blog
* Other occasional writings in Telugu webzines can be found by googling for my name in various forms in Telugu! :-)