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.

July 2024 Update: For the next admissions cycle (December deadlines), I am looking to admit a Ph.D. student interested in interdisciplinary cognitive science. Apply to Linguistics: Computational Linguistics or to Computer Science—whichever department seems like the better fit—and select the Cognitive Science option in the application.

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)