Faculty & Staff
- Lisa Hermsen
- Lisa Diaz
- Sharon Beckford-Foster
- Doris Borrelli
- A.J. Caschetta
- Collette Caton
- Babak Elahi
- Catherine Faurot
- Robert Glick
- Gail Hosking
- Shelly Jansen
- Julie M. Johannes
- David Martins
- Stanley McKenzie
- Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm
- Amit Ray
- Linda M. Reinfeld
- John Roche
- Sandra Saari
- Richard Santana
- Michael Sarnowski
- Laura Shackelford
- Elena R. Sommers
- Thomas Stone
- Paulette Swartzfager
- Karen vanMeenen
- Selma Wilson Jacobson
- Dianna Winslow
Assistant Professor
2110 Liberal Arts
Phone: (585) 475-7327
Email: coagla@rit.edu
In August 2010, Cecilia ("Cissi") Ovesdotter Alm, Ph.D. joined the Department of English at Rochester Institute of Technology's College of Liberal Arts. She is also among the affiliated faculty of the Multidisciplinary Vision Research Laboratory at RIT. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before that, she studied English and American Studies as well as Scandinavian Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, where she additionally completed coursework at the Institute for Translation Studies. To access her CV, some of her publications, or her course syllabi, please see her website at http://tinyurl.com/ceciliaoalm.
Cissi's research examines how language users convey and interpret meaning, beyond traditional semantics and pragmatics. Within language science, she focuses on computational linguistic modeling and corpus analysis, the relationship of language to vision and cognition, and language in human-computer interactions. Areas of application include healthcare, decision-making, and social media communication.
A passionate teacher, Cissi is a believer in diversity in education and in internationalizing educational experiences that prepare students for the global context. She is committed to undergraduate research experiences in language science and to enhancing learning opportunities with technology. She teaches, for example, Introduction to Language Science, Language Technology, and Introduction to Natural Language Processing.
Cissi is a multilingual. Besides the USA, she has lived in Sweden, Great Britain, Austria, Spain, and Ecuador.
SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Book:Alm, C. O. (2009) Affect in Text and Speech. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag. ISBN 978-3-639-11148-4. [Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Affect-Text-Speech-Cecilia-Ovesdotter/dp/3639111486/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235265042&sr=1-1.]
Articles in peer-reviewed journals:
1. Alm, C. O. (2012). The role of affect in the computational modeling of natural language. Language & Linguistics Compass: Computational & Mathematical, 6(7), 416-430.
2. Stenport, A. W., & Alm, C. O. (2009). Corporations, crime, and gender construction in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: exploring twenty-first century neoliberalism in Swedish culture. Scandinavian Studies Journal 81(2), 157-178.
3. Alm, C. O. (2003). English in the Ecuadorian commercial context. World Englishes, 22(2), 143-158.
Articles in peer-reviewed proceedings:
1. Womack, K, McCoy W., Alm, C. O. (2012, July). Disfluencies as extra-propositional indicators of cognitive processing (pp. 1-9). Workshop on Extra-propositional aspect of meaning in computational linguistics at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics 2012, Jeju, Korea.
2. McCoy, W., Alm, C., et al. (2012, July). Annotation schemes to encode domain knowledge in medical narratives (pp. 95-103). The 6th Linguistic Annotation Workshop at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics 2012, Jeju, Korea.
3. McCoy, W., Alm, C., et al. (2012, July). Linking uncertainty in physicians' narratives to diagnostic correctness (pp. 19-27). Workshop on Extra-propositional aspect of meaning in computational linguistics at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics 2012, Jeju, Korea.
4. Lehrman, M., Alm, C. O., & Proaño, R. A. (Forthcoming, 2012, June). Detecting distressed vs. non-
distressed affect state in short forum texts (pp. 9-18). Proceedings of the Workshop on Language in Social Media (LSM 2012) at the Conference of the North Am. Chapter of the Assoc. for Comp. Linguistics—Human Language Technologies 2012, Montreal, Canada.
5. Li, R., et al. (2012, March) Learning eye movement patterns for characterization of perceptual expertise (pp. 393-396). ETRA 2012.
6. Alm, C. O. (2011, June). Subjective natural language problems: Motivations, applications, characterizations, and implications (pp. 107-112).Proceedings of 49th Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Portland, OR.
7. Heimisdóttir, L. Ö., Alm, C. O, Krantz-Odendahl, K., & Coots, I. A. (September, 2010). A resource for learning Swedish oral skills. INTERSPEECH 2010 satellite workshop on Second Language Studies: Acquisition, Learning, Education and Technology, Tokyo, Japan. Online proceedings at
http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/L2WS2010/ (P1-1).
8. Alm, C. O. (2010, July). Characteristics of high agreement affect annotation in text (pp. 118-122). Proceedings of the LAW IV workshop at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Uppsala, Sweden.
9. Alm, C. O., & Llorà, X. (2006, September). Evolving emotional prosody (pp. 1826-1829). Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2006 - ICSLP, Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
10. Alm, C. O., Loeff, N., & Forsyth, D. (2006, July). Challenges for annotating images for sense disambiguation (pp. 1-4). Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Linguistically Annotated Corpora, at the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney.
11. Loeff, N., Alm, C. O., & Forsyth, D. (2006, July). Discriminating image senses by clustering with multimodal features (pp. 547-554). Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney.
12. Alm, C. O., & Sproat, R. (2005, October). Emotional sequencing and development in fairy tales (pp. 668-674). In Tao, J., Tan, T., & Picard, R. W. (Eds.), Proceedings of the First International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, Beijing, China. Springer-Verlag: Berlin, Heidelberg.
13. Alm, C. O., Roth, D., & Sproat, R. (2005, October). Emotions from text: Machine learning for text-based emotion prediction (pp. 579-586). Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Vancouver.
14. Alm, C. O., & Sproat, R. (2005, September). Perceptions of emotions in expressive storytelling (pp. 533-536). Proceedings of Interspeech'2005 - Eurospeech, 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Lisbon, Portugal.
15. Roth, D., Kao-Kao, G., Li, X., Nagarajan, R., Punyanok, V., Rizzolo, N., Yih, W., Alm, C., & Moran, L. (2001). Learning components for a question-answering system. TREC Report.
Book chapters and papers in edited collections:
1. Histon, J., Rantanen, E., & Alm, C. (2012). Air traffic control voice data analysis to validate NextGen procedures. In S. Landry (Ed.), Advances in Human Aspects of Aviation (Advances in Human Factors and Ergonomics Series) (pp. 129-138). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
2. Stenport, A. W., & Alm, C. O. (2012). Corporations, the welfare state, and covert misogyny in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. King, D. & C. Smith (Eds.) (2012). Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Kick Their Asses! Feminist Perspectives on Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (pp. 123-134) Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
3. Alm, C. O. (2011) What can language technologies do for endangered languages, and vice-versa? In Haboud, M. , & N. Ostler. (Eds.) Endangered Languages: Voices and Images, FEL XV (pp. 98-102). Bath: Foundation for Endangered Languages.
4. Forsyth, D. A., Berg, T., Alm, C. O., Farhadi, A., Hockenmaier, J., Loeff, N., & Wang, G. (2009). Words and pictures: categories, modifiers, depiction, and iconography. In S. J. Dickinson, A. Leonardis, A. Schiele, & M. J. Tarr (Eds.). Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives. (pp. 167-181). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Book reviews:
1. Alm, C. O. (2012) Review of Filipi, Anna. (2009). Toddler and Parent Interaction: The organization of gaze, pointing and vocalization. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam/Philadelphia, vol. 192 in Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (xiii + 268 pp. + video clips).
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16(2), 294-296.
2. Alm, C. O. (2004). Review of Johansson and Graedler. (2002). Rocka, hipt og snacksy: om engelsk i norsk språk og samfunn. [“Rocka,” “hipt,” and “snacksy”: About English in Norwegian Language and Society.] Stig Johansson and Anne-Line Graedler, Kristiansand S.: Høyskoleforlaget/Norwegian Academic Press, 2002, 318 pp. World Englishes, 23(4), 614-616.
3. Alm, C. O. (2001). Review of English in Europe: The Acquisition of a Third Language. Edited by Jasone Cenoz and Ulrike Jessner. Clevendon: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 2000, xii + 271 pp. World Englishes, 20(2), 241-243.
Open online textbook (release: GNU General Public License):
1. Alm, C. O. (2009, fall). Window to Swedish and Scandinavia: Modules 1-5 [title translated from Swedish]. Modules 1-5 available via http://people.rc.rit.edu/~coagla/ (section B).
2. Alm, C. O. & Coots, I. A. (2009, fall). Window to Swedish and Scandinavia: Modules 6-7 [title translated from Swedish]. Modules 6-7 available via http://people.rc.rit.edu/~coagla/ (section B).
Linguistically annotated corpora (available at my data page with RIT Research Computing at http://people.rc.rit.edu/~coagla/):
1. Alm, C. O. (2011). Scandinavian Media Collection I: Images by four photographers [Images (more than 600) from Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Iceland) with short text annotations for three photographers and (informal) narrative annotation for one. From a project with Megan Eaton.]
2. Alm, C. O. (2008). Affect Dataset. [Classic literary tales annotated for affective contents (more than 15,000 sentences), including direct access to subset of high inter-annotator agreement.] GNU General Public License.
3. Loeff, N, Alm, C. O., & Forsyth, D. (2006). Image Sense Discrimination Dataset. [Annotations of images (more than 7,000) corresponding to words of lexical ambiguity, paired with images, thumbnails, and accompanying web texts.]
