Philip Resnik's Advisees

Current Advisees and their Research

• Chris Dyer (PhD student in linguistics)
  Source lattice decoding for statistical machine translation

• Tim Hawes (PhD student 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

• Yuval Marton (PhD student in linguistics)
  Monolingual paraphase and statistical machine translation.

• Smaranda Muresan (postdoc)
  Statistical machine translation

• Michael Subotin (PhD student in linguistics)
  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.

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

• David Alexander (Master's degree)
  Effect of topic classification on word sense discriminability. Works for the Census Bureau.

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

• Clara Cabezas
  Word sense disambiguation.

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

• 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, and is now working on location-based services at a "stealth-mode" startup, Locomatix.

• Grazia Russo-Lassner
  Paraphrase.

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

• Rafi Khan (undergraduate)
  Linguist's Search Engine. Finishing his undergraduate CS degree at UMD.

• Greg Marton (undergraduate).
  Various NLP topics. Now a Ph.D. student in the AI Lab at MIT.

• Jesse Metcalf-Burton (undergraduate)
  Linguist's Search Engine. Now a Ph.D. student 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.

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

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

• 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.

• Tim Hunter (PhD student in linguistics)
  Explored ideas in statistical machine translation; now shifting to linguistics dissertation work.