---
title: "Joel Tetreault — author profile and papers"
description: "Joel Tetreault, Princeton University: 13 papers on Elamur Research (1999–2021), h-index 43 — affiliations, topics, co-authors and who cites them in our…"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/joel-tetreault/"
---
[Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/joel-tetreault/)

[home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [authors](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/) / Joel Tetreault

# Joel Tetreault

Joel Tetreault works in natural language processing, with papers here spanning 1999 to 2021. Early work examines pronoun resolution and Centering theory, comparing algorithms by running them automatically on the same corpus. A second strand concerns learner English and [grammatical error correction](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/grammatical-error-correction/), especially preposition mistakes and coherence in student essays. Later papers turn to style, formality, sarcasm and dialogue. Across these areas a recurring concern is [evaluation and benchmarks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/evaluation-benchmarks/): building annotated corpora, measuring human agreement, and testing whether automatic measures track human judgements.

The most cited paper here, [Dear Sir or Madam, May I Introduce the GYAFC Dataset](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/rao-2018-dear-sir-or-madam-may/) (2018), assembles a large parallel corpus for formality transfer. It pairs informal Yahoo Answers sentences with crowd-written formal rewrites and compares rule-based, phrase-based and neural systems. [Detecting Sarcasm in Multimodal Social Platforms](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schifanella-2016-detecting-sarcasm-multimodal-social-platforms/) (2016) treats attached images as context for sarcastic posts from Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter. [Re-examining Machine Translation Metrics for Paraphrase Identification](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/madnani-2012-re-examining-machine-translation-metrics/) (2012) uses translation evaluation scores as the sole features of a paraphrase classifier. The 2008 study of preposition error detection in ESL writing builds a precision-oriented maximum entropy model of correct usage. A 2016 analysis of sentence-level formality in online text combines crowd ratings with a feature-rich regression model.

The newest papers stay with style and conversation. [Evaluating the Evaluation Metrics for Style Transfer](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/briakou-2021-evaluating-evaluation-metrics-style-transfer/) (2021) checks how well automatic measures of style, meaning and fluency agree with human ratings for formality transfer in four languages. [Dialogue Act Classification with Context-Aware Self-Attention](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/raheja-2019-dialogue-act-classification-context-aware/) (2019) labels utterances using the surrounding conversation rather than one at a time.

Tetreault's recent affiliation is Princeton University. Many earlier papers list Dataminr in New York, and before that Yahoo in Sunnyvale and London. The most frequent co-author is [Martin Chodorow](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/martin-chodorow/), on the learner-language work. Other collaborators include [Nitin Madnani](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/nitin-madnani/), [Ellie Pavlick](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ellie-pavlick/) and [Eleftheria Briakou](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/eleftheria-briakou/).

13 papers on this site · 1999–2021

current affiliation [Princeton University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/princeton-university/), Princeton, United States; [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/ludwig-maximilians-universitat-munchen/), Munich, Germany

Joel Tetreault has 13 papers on this site, in 1999–2021, most of them on [Evaluation & benchmarks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/evaluation-benchmarks/), [Discourse analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/discourse-analysis/), [Coreference resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/coreference-resolution/); often with [Martin Chodorow](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/martin-chodorow/), [Amanda Stent](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/amanda-stent/), [Eleftheria Briakou](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/eleftheria-briakou/). 4 of them are among the papers [Mova](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/projects/mova/) reads.

[OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/A5038106045) · [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0003-3552-842X) · [**h-index 43**](https://openalex.org/authors/A5038106045) · [180 works](https://openalex.org/works?filter=author.id:A5038106045) · [7 137 citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=author.id:A5038106045&sort=cited_by_count:desc) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14

[13 works on this site](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/joel-tetreault/#papers) · [868 citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/joel-tetreault/cited-by/) · 6 more works in our library

The profile is the library's match of the name; two people with one name are not always told apart.

Elsewhere: [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=search_authors&mauthors=Joel+Tetreault) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=Joel+Tetreault) · [dblp](https://dblp.org/search?q=Joel+Tetreault) · [ACL Anthology](https://aclanthology.org/search/?q=Joel+Tetreault)

## Affiliations

- [Princeton University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/princeton-university/) · Princeton, United States —current · 2011–2026 on 4 papers
- [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/ludwig-maximilians-universitat-munchen/) · Munich, Germany —current · 2026 on 1 paper
- [Dataminr (United States)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/companies/dataminr/) · New York —2020–2025 on 41 papers
- [Nuance Communications (Austria)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/companies/nuance-communications/) · Vienna, Austria —2013–2025 on 2 papers
- [University of Southern California](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-southern-california/) · Los Angeles, United States —2004–2024 on 2 papers
- [University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-illinois-urbana-champaign/) · Urbana, United States —2018–2023 on 2 papers
- [Yahoo (United Kingdom)](https://ror.org/038p3gq39) · London, United Kingdom —2010–2021 on 10 papers
- [Carnegie Mellon University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/carnegie-mellon-university/) · Pittsburgh, United States —2021 on 2 papers
- [University of Maryland, College Park](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-maryland-college-park/) · College Park, United States —2018–2021 on 2 papers
- [Yahoo (United States)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/companies/yahoo/) · Sunnyvale, United States —2014–2016 on 19 papers

From the bylines of their papers (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14), ORCID and Wikidata; institutions on papers are matched by machine. 13 more institutions on single bylines are not listed.

## Topics

[Evaluation & benchmarks 4](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/evaluation-benchmarks/) · [Discourse analysis 2](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/discourse-analysis/) · [Coreference resolution 2](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/coreference-resolution/) · [Grammatical error correction & learner language 2](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/grammatical-error-correction/) · [Speech act theory 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/speech-act-theory/) · [Dependency parsing 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/dependency-parsing/) · [Machine translation 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/machine-translation/) · [Sentiment & emotion 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/sentiment-emotion/) · [Dialogue systems 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/dialogue-systems/) · [Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multilingual-nlp/) · [Syntax & grammar formalisms 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/syntax-grammar/) · [Vision & language 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multimodal/)

## Works by year

### 2020s

[**2021** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/briakou-2021-evaluating-evaluation-metrics-style-transfer/)

### 2010s

[**2019** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/raheja-2019-dialogue-act-classification-context-aware/) · [**2018** 2 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/joel-tetreault/year/2018/) · [**2016** 2 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/joel-tetreault/year/2016/) · [**2015** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2015-choi-it-depends-dependency-parser-comparison/) · [**2013** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/burstein-2013-holistic-discourse-coherence-annotation-noisy/) · [**2012** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/madnani-2012-re-examining-machine-translation-metrics/) · [**2010** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/han-2010-error-annotated-learner-corpus-develop/)

### 2000s

[**2008** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tetreault-2008-ups-downs-preposition-error-detection/) · [**2001** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tetreault-2001-corpus-based-evaluation-centering-pronoun/)

### 1990s

[**1999** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tetreault-1999-analysis-syntax-based-pronoun-resolution/)

## Papers

The most cited first (OpenAlex and our library).

1. **[Dear Sir or Madam, May I Introduce the GYAFC Dataset: Corpus, Benchmarks and Metrics for Formality Style Transfer](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/rao-2018-dear-sir-or-madam-may/)** *(2018 · 581 citations)* The paper builds the first large parallel corpus for formality transfer. It takes about 53,000 informal sentences each from two Yahoo Answers domains, filtered for length and form, and has crowd workers write one formal rewrite per sentence. Tune and test sets get four expert rewrites each, to reduce the noise of a…
2. **[Detecting Sarcasm in Multimodal Social Platforms](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schifanella-2016-detecting-sarcasm-multimodal-social-platforms/)** *(2016 · 289 citations)* Most sarcasm detectors analyze only text, so they miss cases where an attached image reveals that a caption means the opposite of what it says.
3. **[Re-examining Machine Translation Metrics for Paraphrase Identification](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/madnani-2012-re-examining-machine-translation-metrics/)** *(2012 · 271 citations)* The paper revisits an older idea: since an MT evaluation metric essentially judges whether a system translation says the same thing as a reference, such metrics might work as paraphrase detectors.
4. **[The Ups and Downs of Preposition Error Detection in ESL Writing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tetreault-2008-ups-downs-preposition-error-detection/)** *(2008 · 260 citations)* Prepositions are among the most frequent trouble spots for non-native English writers. Their usage is hard to pin down: in a cloze test on 200 Encarta sentences, two native speakers agreed with each other, and with the original text, only about 75% of the time. The authors build a detector for wrong-choice and…
5. **[An Empirical Analysis of Formality in Online Communication](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/pavlick-2016-empirical-analysis-formality-online-communication/)** *(2016 · 215 citations)* The paper studies sentence-level formality. Crowd workers rated sentences from four genres (news, blogs, emails and Yahoo Answers) on a scale from -3 (very informal) to +3 (very formal), and the agreement among raters is measured. A ridge regression model is then trained on eleven groups of features: n-grams, word…
6. **[It Depends: Dependency Parser Comparison Using A Web-based Evaluation Tool](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2015-choi-it-depends-dependency-parser-comparison/)** *(2015 · 169 citations)* The authors compare ten statistical dependency parsers on the English OntoNotes 5 corpus, which has seven genres and about 2.1 million training tokens, all trained with the same automatic POS tags and dependencies from the ClearNLP converter.
7. **[A Corpus-Based Evaluation of Centering and Pronoun Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tetreault-2001-corpus-based-evaluation-centering-pronoun/)** *(2001 · 125 citations)* This paper asks how leading pronoun resolution algorithms compare when they are implemented and run automatically on the same corpus.
8. **[Dialogue Act Classification with Context-Aware Self-Attention](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/raheja-2019-dialogue-act-classification-context-aware/)** *(2019 · 88 citations)* This NAACL 2019 paper from Grammarly addresses Dialogue Act (DA) classification, which assigns each utterance in a conversation a communicative-function label such as Question, Statement or Backchannel.
9. **[Discourse Coherence in the Wild: A Dataset, Evaluation and Methods](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lai-2018-discourse-coherence-wild-dataset-evaluation/)** *(2018 · 79 citations)* Coherence models have mostly been tested on polished, professionally edited text such as newswire, using artificial tasks like telling an original document from a shuffled version of its sentences.
10. **[Using an Error-Annotated Learner Corpus to Develop an ESL/EFL Error Correction System](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/han-2010-error-annotated-learner-corpus-develop/)** *(2010 · 62 citations)* Most systems that flag preposition mistakes in learner English learn only from correct native-speaker text, so they never see the kinds of confusions learners actually make.
11. **[Analysis of Syntax-Based Pronoun Resolution Methods](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tetreault-1999-analysis-syntax-based-pronoun-resolution/)** *(1999 · 60 citations)* The paper addresses two gaps in pronoun resolution research. First, the Centering-based BFP algorithm (Brennan et al., 1987) cannot resolve pronouns incrementally and can become very expensive to compute. Second, few large-scale empirical comparisons of resolution methods existed.
12. **[Evaluating the Evaluation Metrics for Style Transfer: A Case Study in Multilingual Formality Transfer](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/briakou-2021-evaluating-evaluation-metrics-style-transfer/)** *(2021 · 49 citations)* A meta-evaluation of automatic metrics for formality style transfer, the first multilingual one, covering English, Brazilian Portuguese, French and Italian.
13. **[Holistic Discourse Coherence Annotation for Noisy Essay Writing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/burstein-2013-holistic-discourse-coherence-annotation-noisy/)** *(2013 · 28 citations)* Automated essay scoring needs coherence measures that work on noisy student writing, which often contains grammatical errors, misspellings and weak organization.

## Also in our library

6 more works of theirs are in our library without a page here yet; they will appear as we publish them.

## Co-authors here

11 co-authors with a page, the most papers together first.

- [Martin Chodorow](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/martin-chodorow/) ×3
- [Amanda Stent](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/amanda-stent/)
- [Eleftheria Briakou](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/eleftheria-briakou/)
- [Ellie Pavlick](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ellie-pavlick/)
- [Jill Burstein](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jill-burstein/)
- [Jinho D. Choi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jinho-d-choi/)
- [Marine Carpuat](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/marine-carpuat/)
- [Na-Rae Han](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/na-rae-han/)
- [Nitin Madnani](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/nitin-madnani/)
- [Sweta Agrawal](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sweta-agrawal/)
- [Vipul Raheja](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/vipul-raheja/)

## Cited by

Papers of our library cite their works 868 times (of the 140 884 papers whose bibliographies we read); [96 citing papers with a page here →](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/joel-tetreault/cited-by/).