Thorsten Joachims gave one of the two invited talks at the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), one of the top conferences in NLP. His talk, "Learning from Rational Behavior", considers how NLP systems can learn from the observable choices that people make when they use language-based systems.
Bo Pang (CUCS Ph.D. '06) was the program co-chair of the conference.