Group
My lab is called NERT.
We have fun playing with language data and algorithms.
Prospective advisees
Georgetown has a strong community of computational linguistics researchers.
Consider applying in Linguistics (Computational Linguistics concentration) and/or Computer Science.
→ Ph.D. application deadlines: Dec. 1 for Linguistics, Dec. 15 (preferred) for CS.
November 2023 Update: I may take a Ph.D. advisee in the next admissions cycle, in the area of computational semantics/parsing/NLU. I will not know for sure before January. Please apply to whichever department you think is a better fit: see the above deadlines. I am looking for someone with research or industry experience in NLP or computational linguistics—if you do not have this yet, you may apply to the MS.
If you want to work with me and are not already a Georgetown student, your best bet is to apply and mention me in your statement of purpose. (Statement of purpose advice) Unfortunately, I do not have room to host visiting students or interns from outside the DC area. I cannot guarantee a response to email inquiries from prospective students or visitors.
If you're already a Georgetown student, come talk to me about your research interests and ideas!
Past advisees
At Georgetown, I (co-)supervised the following theses:
- Siyao (Logan) Peng (Ph.D. dissertation, Linguistics, 2023), Cross-Paragraph Discourse Structure in Rhetorical Structure Theory Parsing and Treebanking for Chinese and English (coadvisor: Amir Zeldes). Dr. Peng is now a postdoctoral researcher at LMU Munich.
- Jakob Prange (Ph.D. dissertation, CS with concentration in Cognitive Science, 2022), Neuro-Symbolic Models for Conducting, Comparing, and Combining Syntactic and Semantic Representations. Dr. Prange is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Augsburg.
- Austin Blodgett (Ph.D. dissertation, Linguistics, 2021), Linguistic Interpretability and Composition of Abstract Meaning Representations. Dr. Blodgett is now a researcher at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
- Emma Manning (Ph.D. dissertation, Linguistics, 2021), Referenceless Evaluation of Natural Language Generation from Meaning Representations. Dr. Manning is now an Analytical Linguist at Google.
- Julia Hockett (senior thesis, CS, 2017), “Detecting and Using Buzz from Newspapers to Understand Patterns of Movement” (coadvisor: Lisa Singh)
Other Georgetown advisees:
- Lucia Donatelli, Spanish Linguistics (Ph.D., Spanish Linguistics, 2019). Dr. Donatelli is now a postdoctoral researcher in computational linguistics at Saarland University.
At the University of Edinburgh, I co-supervised the following MSc theses:
- Marco Damonte (2015), “Machine Translation with Coarse Lexical Semantics” (with Alexandra Birch)
- Nora Hollenstein (2015), “Inconsistency Detection in Semantic Annotation” (with Bonnie Webber)
- Ye Yang (2015), “Recognizing Annotator Behavior in Crowdsourcing” (with Bonnie Webber)
- Felisia Loukou (2016), “Light Verb Constructions in Distributional Entailment Graphs” (with Mark Steedman)
- Ida Szubert (2016), “Methods for Automatic Alignment of Abstract Meaning Representation and Dependency Grammar” (with Adam Lopez)