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I am a Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins' Human Language Technology Center of Excellence focused on Multilingual Natural Language Processing. I received my PhD from the University of Notre Dame where I was advised by David Chiang. My dissertation, "Learning Hyperparameters for Neural Machine Translation", looked at ways to automatically conduct hyperparamter search during model training as opposed to grid or random search. Before my current role, I spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Language and Speech Processing working with Benjamin Van Durme on Crosslingual Semantics, Information Extraction, and Information Retrieval. In general, my research interests can be described as improving core Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and algorithms with a particular focus on multilingual applications and in low-resource settings.
Prior to starting at Notre Dame, I have had the good fortune to work in a variety of research labs with many excellent advisors. Most recently, I was a Research Associate at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) working with Dr. Stephan Vogel on Machine Translation. I was in the Arabic Language Technologies Group and primarily focus on translating to and from Arabic. Before that, I received a Master's in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science’s Language Technologies Institute. I was advised by Professor Daniel Neill and worked in the Event and Pattern Detection Lab on incorporating unstructured text into event detection. I was also very active in the Machine Translation Group contributing to the 2013 WMT task and leading paper discussions in the reading group with a particular focus on Quality Estimation.
Before CMU, I graduated from Princeton University’s School of Engineering where I majored in Computer Science. My Senior Thesis at Princeton was “Summarization by Latent Dirichlet Allocation” which used a randomly selected corpus of 1,000 articles from Wikipedia and then generated 10 sentence summaries of each article. Advised by David Blei, our results were statistically significant — demonstrating better summaries than two other leading methods from the field. A copy of the thesis can be obtained under the Research Interests Section.
Outside of research, I have spent some time in industry. While at CMU, I worked part-time at Alon Lavie's startup, Safaba Translation Solutions, building tailored translation engines for corporate clients to internationalize their communications. I also worked as an Engineer at Microsoft on Dynamics CRM Online working on the back end of a large scale cloud service. My projects included the backup system, deployment, and internationalization of the product to 40 languages in 41 countries. I also spent some time working on startups including the innovative Lighter Capital who are dying to give away some money to small businesses.