Philip Resnik's Advisees

Current Advisees and their Research

• Olivia Buzek (undergrad in Linguistics and CS)
  Crowdsourcing, paraphrase, and translation

• Vlad Eidelmann (PhD student in CS)
  Statistical machine translation

• Eric Hardisty (PhD student in CS)
  Computational modeling for sentiment analysis

• Kristy Hollingshead (postdoc; PhD with Brian Roark at OGI)
  Machine translation

• Chang Hu (PhD student in CS, co-advised with Ben Bederson)
  Crowdsourcing and translation, UI aspects

• Yakov Kronrod (PhD student in Linguistics)
  Crowdsourcing and translation, MT aspects

• Brianna Satinoff (master's student in CS, co-advised with Jimmy Lin)
  Topic modeling and visualization

• Hendra Setiawan (postdoc)
  Statistical machine translation

• Michael Subotin (PhD student in linguistics, co-advised with Amy Weinberg)
  Machine learning and statistical machine translation

Students awarded the Ph.D. (and where they wound up!)

• Dr. Mona Diab
  Mona's 2003 linguistics dissertation, "Word Sense Disambiguation Within a Multingual Framework", focused on unsupervised word sense disambiguation using parallel corpora. After graduation, became a postdoc working with Dan Jurafsky at University of Colorado and Stanford University. Now a research scientist at Columbia University.

• Dr. Okan Kolak
  Okan's 2005 computer science dissertation, "Rapid Resource Transfer for Natural Language Processing", focused on development of language technology for low-resource language by taking advantage of existing resources for well studied languages, with applications in optical character recognition and parsing. Now employed at Google.

• Dr. Stephan Greene
  Stephan is a Senior Software Engineer in the NLP group at Art Technology Group (ATG), Inc. His 2007 linguistics dissertation, Spin: Lexical Semantics, Transitivity, and the Identification of Implicit Sentiment (short abstract) focused on the way that the choice of underlying semantic properties of an event description, reflected in syntactic structures, sheds light on the speaker's attitudes about the event. The underlying connection between semantic components and perceived attitude was established via psycholinguistic experimentation, and the ideas were then operationalized using an automatic parser and applied in sentiment classification experiments that demonstrated significant improvement over the prior state of the art.

• Dr. Adam Lopez.
  Adam wrote his 2008 dissertation on Machine Translation by Pattern Matching, and he also authored an excellent survey on Statistical Machine Translation coming out in ACM Computing Surveys 40(3), Sep 2008. Adam's dissertation breaks new ground in the scalability of statistical MT systems that go beyond flat phrase-based representations (e.g. hierarchical phrase-based models), by making it possible to do efficient pattern matching using patterns that contain gaps. He is now a postdoctoral research fellow working with Philipp Koehn on statistical machine translation at the University of Edinburgh, and will be starting at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at JHU in Fall 2010.

• Dr. Yuval Marton.
  Yuval's 2009 dissertation, entitled “Fine-Grained Linguistic Soft Constraints on Statistical Natural Language Processing Models”, focused on using soft syntactic and semantic constraints in end-to-end state-of-the-art statistical machine translation systems. He also introduced a novel distributional paraphrase generation technique based on monolingual phrase similarity. Yuval is now a post-doctoral researcher at the Columbia University Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS), working with Nizar Habash and Owen Rambow on syntactic parsing, focusing on Arabic parsing for statistical machine translation.

• Dr. Chris Dyer.
  Chris's 2010 dissertation defines a new framework for modeling ambiguity, with particular application to (but far from limited to) statistical machine translation. The key idea is to move from strings to weighted sets when thinking about the inputs, outputs, and gold-standard references for supervised training in an NLP pipeline. This turns out to be a really powerful way of looking at processing, leading to empirical, algorithmic, and even theoretical (a theorem proved!) contributions. Chris will be doing a postdoc with Noah Smith at CMU's LTI starting in Fall 2010.

Former Postdocs (and where they wound up!)

• Rebecca Hwa (postdoc, co-advised; PhD, Harvard, 2001)
  Learning algorithms for cross-language processing and machine translation. Now an assistant professor at University of Pittsburgh.

• David Chiang (postdoc, PhD UPenn, 2004)
  Statistical machine translation. Now a researcher at USC/ISI.

• Smaranda Muresan (postdoc; PhD, Columbia)
  Statistical machine translation. Now an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers.

• Jordan Boyd-Graber (postdoc, PhD Princeton, 2009)
  Machine learning. Starting as an assistant professor at UMD's iSchool in Fall 2010.

Other Former Advisees etc. (and where they wound up!)

• David Alexander (Master's degree in Applied Math)
  Effect of topic classification on word sense discriminability. Now at JHU HLT Center of Excellence.

• Aitziber Atutxa (Master's degree in Linguistics)
  Basque NLP; semantics/syntax interface. Now an instructor and researcher with the Ixa Group at the University of the Basque Country. (publications)

• Clara Cabezas (Master's degree in Linguistics)
  Word sense disambiguation.

• Aaron Elkiss (undergraduate)
  Linguist's Search Engine. After completing his undergraduate degree, worked with me at UMD full time on the Linguist's Search Engine project, the ICDL Communities project, and statistical machine translation. Then got master's in CS at University of Michigan, moved on location-based services at a "stealth-mode" startup.

• Ed Kenschaft (Linguistics)
  Word sense disambiguation and lexical selection in MT.

• Rafi Khan (undergraduate in CS)
  Linguist's Search Engine.

• Greg Marton (undergraduate in CS).
  Various NLP topics. Spent time at the AI Lab at MIT; now at Google in New York.

• Jesse Metcalf-Burton (undergraduate)
  Linguist's Search Engine. Went on to a Ph.D, in Mathematics at the University of Michigan.

• Mike Nossal (NLP research programmer)
  Now a senior NLP developer at CodeRyte, a company applying language technology to clinical data management.

• Grazia Russo-Lassner
  Paraphrase.

• Aga Skotowski (Master's degree)
  Went on to work in NLP research at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), and MetaCarta.

• Noah Smith (undergraduate in Linguistics and CS).
  Translation detection and mining the Web for parallel text. Went on to be a computer science Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins, and a Hertz Foundation Fellow, and is currently an assistant professor at CMU.

• Jessica Stevens (undergraduate in CS)
  Supervised word sense disambiguation. Now working in NLP research at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN).

• Tim Hunter (PhD student in linguistics)
  Explored ideas in statistical machine translation. He shifted to a linguistics dissertation in syntax, and is doing a postdoc with Bob Frank at Yale.

• Tim Hawes (Master's in linguistics)
  Sentiment analysis and deliberative discourse (co-advised with Jimmy Lin).

• Ederlyn Lacson (LSAMP undergraduate in linguistics and CS)
  Psycholinguistic methods exploring sentiment analysis