Brief Biography

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the natural language processing group at U.C. Berkeley. My supervisor is professor Dan Klein. Before that, I was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, in the natural language computing group.  If you read Chinese, you might prefer the Chinese homepage of the NLC group. I did my graduate studies in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. My advisor was the inimitable Fernando Pereira. Even further back, I graduated from Cornell University, where my undergraduate advisors were Claire Cardie and Lillian Lee. I grew up in Fort Myers, Florida, in the vicinity of the famous Blitzer ducks.

Interests

I work on applications of machine learning to natural language.  My research focuses in particular on learning compact, low-dimensional semantic and syntactic representations that generalize across lexical items.  My co-authors and I have applied such representations to language modeling, part of speech tagging and sentiment classification, and I hope that they will one day be useful in automatic summarization and machine translation.

Professional Activities

Harbin Institute of Technology and MSRA Joint Summer School on NLP
I taught a course on supervised and semi-supervised learning with linear models at the HIT/MSRA joint summer school on NLP.

ACL 2008 tutorial on semi-supervised learning
Jerry Zhu and I co-taught a tutorial at ACL 2008 on semi-supervised learning.

Program committee member
I am currently serving on the program committee for NIPS 2008. I have previously served on the program committees for ACL 2008, AAAI 2008, ICML 2008, NIPS 2007, ICML 2007, EMNLP 2007, ACL 2007, AISTATS 2007, and ICML 2006.

NIPS 2006 workshop
At NIPS 2006, Kilian Weinberger, Rajarshi Das, Irina Rish, and I ran a workshop on applications of dimensionality reduction.