Hi, I’m Billy. I’m doing my PhD in computer science and cognitive science with Zoran Tiganj at Indiana University working on deep learning and natural language processing. I’m interested in improving the efficiency and performance of large language models with compressive memory, particularly drawing inspiration from cognitive models of human memory. Additionally, I’m broadly interested in retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and exploring the integration of knowledge representations with large language models to enhance their understanding and inference capabilities. 👻
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] Dickson, B., Maini, S. S., Nosofsky, R., & Tiganj, Z. (2024, July 4). Comparing Perceptual Judgments in Large Multimodal Models and Humans. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/pcmrj
[pdf] Cavar, D., Tiganj, Z., Mompelat, L. V. & Dickson, B., (2024) “Computing Ellipsis Constructions: Comparing Classical NLP and LLM Approaches”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 7(1), 217–226. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.2147
[pdf] Cavar, D., Aljubailan, A., Mompelat, L., Won, Y., Dickson, B., Fort, M., Davis, A., & Kim, S. (2022). Event sequencing annotation with TIE-ML. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-18 2022), at LREC 2022 in Marseille, France.
[pdf] Cavar, D., Dickson, B., Aljubailan, A., & Kim, S. (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] Cavar, D., Abdo, M. S., & Dickson, B. (2024). Ellipsis in Arabic: Using machine learning to detect and predict elided words. Paper presented at the 37th Conference of the Arabic Linguistic Society (ASAL), February 2024, New York City.
[pdf] Dickson, B., Kim, S., Cavar, D., & Aljubailan, A. (2021). Temporal information and event markup language (TIE-ML). Poster session presented at Indiana University, Bloomington.
[pdf] Dickson, B. (2021). A simple annotation schema for temporal expressions. Presentation at the Central Kentucky Linguistics Conference.
Teaching:
Summer 2024, Generative AI and Symbolic Knowledge Representations: Large Language Models, Knowledge, and Reasoning (ESSLLI 2024, Leuven, Belgium)
Spring 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Associate Instructor, Data Mining (Indiana University)
Spring 2020, Adult Communicative Focused English (Michigan State University)