Group

NERT
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.

May 2025 Update: For the next admissions cycle (December deadlines), I am looking to admit a Ph.D. student in Computer Science (optionally in combination with interdisciplinary cognitive science). Applicants to the Computational Linguistics program should list Amir Zeldes and/or Ethan Wilcox as prospective advisors.

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!

Current advisees

See: NERT lab

Past advisees

Doctoral advisees

At Georgetown, I (co-)supervised the following Ph.D. dissertations (see also NERT lab and my CV):

Shabnam Behzad2024Language Learning Meets Generative AI: Utilizing Large Language Models for Metalinguistic Explanations*
Michael Kranzlein2024Unpacking Meaning with Natural Language Processing: Legal Metalanguage Analysis and Long-Tail Calibration
Shira Wein2024Development and Evaluation of Cross-lingual Abstract Meaning Representation
Siyao (Logan) Peng2023Cross-Paragraph Discourse Structure in Rhetorical Structure Theory Parsing and Treebanking for Chinese and English*
Jakob Prange2022Neuro-Symbolic Models for Conducting, Comparing, and Combining Syntactic and Semantic Representations
Austin Blodgett2021Linguistic Interpretability and Composition of Abstract Meaning Representations
Emma Manning2021Referenceless Evaluation of Natural Language Generation from Meaning Representations
* Amir Zeldes, coadvisor

Other Georgetown advisees:

Bachelor’s and master’s theses

At Georgetown, I (co-)supervised the following theses:

  • Julia Hockett (senior thesis, CS, 2017), “Detecting and Using Buzz from Newspapers to Understand Patterns of Movement” (coadvisor: Lisa Singh)

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)