Philip Resnik's Advisees

For my former advisees, I try indicate what they wound up doing after working with me. However, it's hard to keep up with what everyone does, so please note that information may be missing or out of date.

You may notice that I use the "Dr." title explicitly on this page, which is a bit more formal than typical in computational linguistics. I've done that for a long time when listing my former students, but it became more visibly important in December 2020 with the publication of a Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing Dr. Jill Biden for her use of the title that she earned. I am not dignifying that editorial with a link, but rather I will link this excellent response.

Current advisees and their research

Dr. Shohini Bhattasali (Linguistics/UMIACS postdoc)
Computational cognitive neuroscience of language.
Joe Barrow (CS, co-advised with Doug Oard)
NLP and deep learning related to document structure, synoptic reading.
Alexander Hoyle (CS)
NLP and machine learning in computational social science.
Pranav Goel (CS)
NLP and machine learning in computational social science.
Rupak Sarkar (CS)
NLP and machine learning in computational social science.

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

Note that although I do my best to follow folks and keep up to date, not all the information here is necessarily current!

Dr. Mona Diab. (Linguistics)
Mona's 2003 linguistics dissertation, "Word Sense Disambiguation Within a Multingual Framework", focused on unsupervised word sense disambiguation using parallel corpora. After graduation, she did a postdoc working with Dan Jurafsky at University of Colorado and Stanford University, and was research faculty at Columbia University. After progressing as faculty up to full professor at George Washington University, she served as a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon AI and is now at Facebook AI.
Dr. Okan Kolak . (CS)
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 Staff Research Scientist / Technical Lead Manager at Google.
Dr. Stephan Greene. (Linguistics)
Stephan was a Senior Software Engineer in the NLP group at Art Technology Group (ATG), Inc., went on to work in clinical NLP at 3M, then led NLP at New Brand Analytics, was lead engineer at Sprinklr, and is currently Chief Technology Officer at Converseon. 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. He went on to be senior NLP engineer at CodeRyte, NLP lead at NewBrand Analytics, and is now a lead engineer at Sprinklr.
Dr. Adam Lopez. (CS)
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 went on to be a postdoctoral research fellow working with Philipp Koehn on statistical machine translation at the University of Edinburgh, then was at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at JHU, and is now on the faculty at the University of Edinburgh.
Dr. Yuval Marton. (Linguistics)
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 went on to be 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; he then worked in a variety of industry positions and is now an NLP consultant and affiliate faculty at University of Washington.
Dr. Chris Dyer. (Linguistics)
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 did a postdoc with Noah Smith at CMU's LTI and was then faculty at CMU; he is now at Google DeepMind in London.
Dr. Chang Hu (CS, co-advised with Ben Bederson).
(CS) Chang's dissertation developed the idea of monolingual translation, using human-computer interaction insights, crowdsourcing, and underlying machine translation technology to create a system in which crowds of monolingual users can help each other to translate text -- in an environment where nobody is assumed to know both the source and target language. Chang is now at Microsoft.
Dr. Vlad Eidelmann . (CS)
Vlad's 2013 dissertation advances online discriminative learning methods in machine translation, with applicability to other large scale structured prediction problems. Vlad is now Vice President of Research at FiscalNote.
Dr. Viet-An Nguyen. (CS, co-advised with Jordan Boyd-Graber)
An's thesis focused on developing probabilistic topic models for applications in natural language processing and computational social science, with particular application to computational political science. He's now a Data Scientist in the Core Data Science team at Facebook working on computational methods to study interesting latent structures extracted from observed data. (Co-advised with Jordan Boyd-Graber)
Dr. Allyson Ettinger (Linguistics, co-advised with Colin Phillips)
Issues of meaning and representation in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. Now faculty at University of Chicago.
Dr. Weiwei Yang (CS, co-advised with Jordan Boyd-Graber) Topic modeling in computational social science. Now at Facebook.
Dr. Thang Nguyen (CS, co-advised with Jordan Boyd-Graber) Now working on big data solutions for government clients.
Dr. Han-chin Shing (CS, co-advised with Doug Oard)
Han's thesis focused on NLP and machine learning for clinical and mental health applications. He's now joining Amazon Comprehend Medical.

Former postdocs (and where they wound up!)

Dr. Rebecca Hwa (postdoc, co-advised; PhD, Harvard, 2001)
Learning algorithms for cross-language processing and machine translation. Now faculty at University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. David Chiang (postdoc, PhD UPenn, 2004)
Statistical machine translation. Researcher at USC/ISI, now faculty at Notre Dame.
Dr. Smaranda Muresan (postdoc; PhD, Columbia)
Statistical machine translation. Faculty in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers, now at Columbia University.
Dr. Jordan Boyd-Graber (postdoc, PhD Princeton, 2009)
Machine learning. Started as an assistant professor at UMD's iSchool in Fall 2010, then moved to University of Colorado CS department, now back as faculty at UMD!
Dr. Kristy Hollingshead (postdoc; PhD with Brian Roark at OGI)
Statistical machine translation. NSA; went on to be a researcher at Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, now at Altamira Technologies.
Dr. Hendra Setiawan (postdoc; PhD School of Computing, National University of Singapore )
Statistical machine translation. IBM, then BBN, now R&D scientist and engineer at Apple.
Dr. Junhui Li (postdoc; PhD at Soochow University).
Statistical machine translation. Now faculty at Soochow University.
Dr. Amittai Axelrod (postdoc; PhD with Xiaodong He and Mari Ostendorf at University of Washington)
Machine translation; data selection for machine learning. Went on to Amazon Translate.
Dr. Hadi Amiri (postdoc; PhD with Tat-Seng Chua, National University of Singapore)
NLP, deep learning, and social media analysis. Went on to be a research fellow at Harvard in clinical applications and is now faculty at University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Other former advisees etc. (and where they wound up!)

Note that although I do my best to follow folks and keep up to date, not all the information here is necessarily current!

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 to location-based services at a "stealth-mode" startup, and is now working in the U Mich library system.
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)
Went on to be a senior NLP developer at CodeRyte, a company applying language technology to clinical data; now a developer in Seattle.
Grazia Russo-Lassner (Linguistics)
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, then faculty at CMU, now faculty at University of Washington.
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, did postdocs at Yale and Cornell, and became an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota; he's now on the faculty at UCLA.
Tim Hawes (Master's in linguistics)
Sentiment analysis and deliberative discourse (co-advised with Jimmy Lin). Now Scientist / Principal Investigator at Decisive Analytics Corporation.
Ederlyn Lacson (LSAMP undergraduate in linguistics and CS)
Psycholinguistic methods exploring sentiment analysis. Now at Microsoft.
Olivia Buzek (undergrad in Linguistics and CS)
Crowdsourcing, paraphrase, and translation. Went on to be a PhD student at Johns Hopkins; now at BBN.
Eric Hardisty (Master degree in CS)
Computational modeling for sentiment analysis. Now a DoD contractor.
Yakov Kronrod (PhD student in Linguistics)
Crowdsourcing and translation, MT aspects. Shifted topics and completed his PhD in Linguistics with Naomi Feldman; now at Spotify.
Brianna (Satinoff) Greenberg (master's degree in CS, co-advised with Jimmy Lin)
Topic modeling and visualization. Now working in clinical NLP at 3M.
Michael Subotin (PhD student in linguistics, co-advised with Amy Weinberg)
Machine learning and statistical machine translation. Now working on machine learning and NLP at 3M.
Isaac Julien (Master's degree in CS)
Went on to Epic (electronic medical records), now research engineer at Bose Corporation.
Peter Enns (PhD student in Linguistics)
Now at Amazon.
Ke Wu (PhD student in CS)
Now at Google.
Meir Friedman (CS undergraduate)
Now a PhD student in CS at Cornell.
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Andrew Hian-Cheong (CS master's)
Did his master's while still full-time at FiscalNote, still there.