Hi, I’m Billy. I’m doing my PhD in computer science and cognitive science with Zoran Tiganj at Indiana University working on cognitively inspired deep learning and natural language processing. I’m particularly interested in utilizing cognitive models of human memory to improve large language models, and developing cognitively inspired benchmarks for evaluating state of the art large language models. 👻

I did my master’s in computational linguistics at Indiana University with Damir Cavar in the NLP Lab working on temporal and event reasoning and knowledge representations, and before that I did my bachelor’s at Michigan State University where I studied linguistics, TESOL, Chinese, and Korean, and did a summer language program at Harbin Institute of Technology.

Publications:

[pdf] D. Cavar, A. Aljubailan, L. Mompelat, Y. Won, B. Dickson, M. Fort, A. Davis, and S. Kim (2022) Event Sequencing Annotation with TIE-ML, In proceedings of the The Eighteenth Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-18 2022), at LREC 2022 in Marsaille, France.

[pdf] D. Cavar, B. Dickson, A. Aljubailan, and S. Kim (2021) Temporal Information and Event Markup Language: TIE-ML Markup Process and Schema Version 1.0, In Proceedings of SEMAPRO 2021, Barcelona, Spain.

Presentations:

[pdf] D. Cavar, M. S. Abdo, and B. Dickson (2024) Ellipsis in Arabic: Using Machine Learning to Detect and Predict Elided Words. Paper presented at the Arabic Linguistic Society (ASAL) 37 Conference, February 2024, New York City.

[pdf] B. Dickson, S. Kim, D. Cavar, and A. Aljubailan (2021) Temporal Information and Event Markup Language (TIE-ML), Poster, Indiana University at Bloomington.

[pdf] B. Dickson (2021) A Simple Annotation Schema for Temporal Expressions, Presentation, Central Kentucky Linguistics Conference.

Teaching:

Spring 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Lead Associate Instructor, Data Mining (Indiana University)

Spring 2020, Co-Instructor, Adult Communicative Focused English (Michigan State University)