I'm an Applied Scientist at Amazon Alexa AI in Sunnyvale, CA, where I work on NLG for Alexa Conversations. Prior to joining Amazon, I completed my PhD in 2019 working on stylistic control for natural language generation with Prof. Marilyn Walker at the Natural Language and Dialog Systems Lab at UC Santa Cruz. My research interests include dialog systems, conversational AI, and stylistic variation in NLG.
Recent Work
- Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation. Y. Du, S. Oraby, V. Perera, M. Shen, A. Narayan-Chen, T. Chung, A. Venkatesh, and D. Hakkani-Tur. INLG 2020. Virtual. (paper)
- Learning from Mistakes: Combining Ontologies via Self-Training for Dialogue Generation. L. Reed, V. Harrison, S. Oraby, D. Hakkani-Tur, and Marilyn Walker. SIGDIAL 2020. Virtual. [Best Paper Nominee] (paper)
- Stylistic Control for Neural Natural Language Generation. S. Oraby. PhD Thesis, University of California Santa Cruz, June 2019. (thesis)
- Curate and Generate: A Corpus and Method for Joint Control of Semantics and Style in Neural NLG. S. Oraby, V. Harrison, A. Ebrahimi, and M. Walker. ACL 2019. Florence, Italy. (paper)
- Neural MultiVoice Models for Expressing Novel Personalities in Dialog. S. Oraby, L. Reed, S. TS, S. Tandon, and M. Walker. Interspeech 2018. Hyderabad, India. (paper)
- Controlling Personality-Based Stylistic Variation with Neural Natural Language Generators. S. Oraby, L. Reed, S. Tandon, S. TS, S. Lukin, and M. Walker. SIGDIAL 2018. Melbourne, Australia. (paper)
- Exploring Conversational Language Generation for Rich Content about Hotels. M. Walker, A. Smither, S. Oraby, V. Harrison, H. Shemtov. LREC 2018. [Joint work with Google Research] (paper)
- Modeling and Computational Characterization of Twitter Customer Service Conversations. S. Oraby, M. Bhuiyan, P. Gundecha, J. Mahmud, R. Akkiraju. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) Journal, 2019. [Joint work with IBM Research] (paper)
Conference Activities
- Co-Organizer, Human-in-the-Loop Dialog Systems Workshop, NeurIPS 2020
- Co-Lead, ACL Group Mentoring Session: Finding a Great Advisor/Mentor and Surviving Grad School, ACL 2020
- Mentor, Widening NLP Mentorship Roundtable: Choosing Between Industry and Academia, WiNLP 2020
- Session Lead, NLG Breakout Session, SIGDIAL 2020
- Student Co-Chair, NAACL 2018 Student Research Workshop
- Organizer, SIGDIAL 2017 Special Session on NLG for Dialogue Systems
- Program Committee, EMNLP 2020, ACL 2020, NAACL 2019, IUI 2019, ACL 2018, SIGDIAL 2018, SIGDIAL 2017
- Student Volunteer, ACL 2019, ACL 2017, EMNLP 2017
Contact & Links
- orabys at amazon
- Google Scholar