I teach computers about human language.
I also teach humans about teaching computers about human language.

Portrait of Nathan Schneider I am an academic—which is to say, a professional nerd. Specifically, a computer nerd and a language nerd. I am interested in human language from the angles of cognition, description, and computation. My expertise is in empirical approaches to computational linguistics (CL—applying computational methods to the study of language) and natural language processing (NLP—building technologies that reason intelligently about language). To analyze natural language text, my work employs a medley of methods from linguistics, data science, and machine learning.

Within CL/NLP, my focus is on computational semantics and natural language understanding. This encompasses the design of meaning representations; human annotation of corpora; and statistical computational modeling. I look for ways to make datasets, models, and tools more informative, accurate, multilingual, robust, and practical. For example: developing tools that work for informal social media language, not just news articles.

At Georgetown, I lead interdisciplinary courses and research in the Linguistics and Computer Science departments, as well as advising students in both departments. My lab is called NERT.

Background

My CV. Career highlights:

2022–present
Associate Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, Georgetown University
2016–2022
Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, Georgetown University
2014–2016
Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh
2008–2014
Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University
Summer 2012
Intern at USC ISI
2004–2008
Undergraduate at UC Berkeley, majoring in Computer Science and Linguistics
Noah's ARK group

Noah’s ARK in 2014, CMU

FAQ

Q: Are you a linguist or a computer scientist?
A: Yes.

Q: As a human language scientist/engineer, are you also human?
A: In most respects. (My surname can mean “daddy longlegs” in German, however.)

Q: What’s the difference between a geek and a nerd?
A: Evidently, you are both.

Q: Do you maintain a collection of scholarly remarks on the mind-boggling versalitility of the preposition ‘for’?
A: For sure.

Q: Are you interested in my hedge fund?
A: Yes, provided that you are funding research on hedges.

Q: Can you help me debug this C code?
A: Segmentation fault

Q: Did you once win a historical linguistics limerick contest?
A: *blushes*

Q: Your old website was better. Where did it go?
A: The sentimental can find it here.

Q: Was this FAQ inspired by Mister Language Person?
A: You are truly an alert reader.