Group

NERT
My main lab is called NERT. We have fun playing with language data and algorithms.
I also codirect the LegIT Lab, which conducts research on legal interpretation and technology.

Prospective advisees

Georgetown has a strong community of computation-and-language researchers. Consider applying in Linguistics (Computational Linguistics program) and/or Computer Science.
→ Ph.D. application deadlines: Dec. 1 for Linguistics, Dec. 15 (preferred) for CS.

May 2026 Update: In the next admissions cycle (December deadlines), I may admit a Ph.D. student either in Computer Science or Computational Linguistics. (Both programs give students the option to participate in the interdisciplinary cognitive science concentration.)

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, LegIT lab

Past advisees

Postdoctoral advisees

Brandon Waldon, 2024–25

Doctoral advisees

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

Tatsuya Aoyama2025Inductive Bias, Emergent Structure, and Pretraining Data in Cognitive Modeling
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)