Office

Information Sciences Institute 940

Mailing address

USC Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292

Phone

(O) +1-310-448-9341

(F) +1-310-822-0751

E-mail

my last name @isi.edu

Computer Scientist (ISI)
Research Assistant Professor (USC Computer Science)

I am interested in statistical machine translation, particularly applications of synchronous grammars to statistical MT. During my PhD work at the University of Pennsylvania under Aravind Joshi, I worked on tree-adjoining grammars and related formalisms; stochastic TAG parsing models; synchronous grammars; and formal grammars applied to RNA and protein structure prediction. Curriculum vitae

Current and recent activities:

• NAACL HLT 2010 in Los Angeles
• Third Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation co-located with NAACL HLT 2009 in Boulder
• Teaching CS 544, Natural Language Processing and CS 562, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
• 2008 ISI Summer Internship program

Selected publications

Machine translation

• Online large-margin training of syntactic and structural translation features. With Yuval Marton and Philip Resnik, 2008. In Proc. EMNLP. [PDF]
• Decomposability of translation metrics for improved evaluation and efficient algorithms. With Steve DeNeefe, Yee Seng Chan, and Hwee Tou Ng, 2008. In Proc. EMNLP. [PDF]
• Hierarchical phrase-based translation. 2007. Computational Linguistics 33(2):201–228. [PDF] Expands on the ACL 2005 paper below with a description, including experimental results, of the decoding algorithm ("cube pruning").
• Forest rescoring: faster decoding with integrated language models. Liang Huang and David Chiang, 2007. In Proc. ACL. [PDF]
• Word sense disambiguation improves statistical machine translation. Yee Seng Chan, Hwee Tou Ng, and David Chiang, 2007. In Proc. ACL. [PDF]
• A hierarchical phrase-based model for statistical machine translation. 2005. In Proc. ACL, pages 263–270. Best paper award. [PDF]

Statistical parsing

• The hidden TAG model: synchronous grammars for parsing resource-poor languages. 2006. In Proc. TAG+8, pages 1–8. With Owen Rambow. [PDF]
• Parsing Arabic dialects. 2006. In Proc. EACL. With Mona Diab, Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, and Safiullah Shareef. [PDF]
• Better k-best parsing. 2005. In Proc. IWPT. Liang Huang and David Chiang. [PDF]
• Recovering latent information in treebanks. 2002. With Daniel M. Bikel. In Proc. COLING 2002, pages 183–189. [PS] [PDF]
• Statistical parsing with an automatically extracted tree adjoining grammar. 2003. In Data Oriented Parsing, CSLI Publications, pages 299–316. Combines and updates results from two papers, from ACL 2000 and the colocated Chinese workshop. [PS] [PDF]

Biological sequence analysis

• Computational linguistics: a new tool for exploring biopolymer structures and statistical mechanics. 2007. Ken A. Dill, Adam Lucas, Julia Hockenmaier, Liang Huang, David Chiang, and Aravind K. Joshi. Polymer 48:4289–4300.
• Grammatical representations of macromolecular structure. 2006. J. Computational Biology 13(5):1077–1100. With Aravind K. Joshi and David B. Searls.
• A grammatical theory for the conformational changes of simple helix bundles. 2006. J. Computational Biology 13(1):21–42. With Aravind K. Joshi and Ken A. Dill.

Formal grammars and their applications

• An introduction to synchronous grammars: part of a tutorial given at ACL 2006 with Kevin Knight. Notes: [PDF] Slides: [PDF]
• Some remarks on an extension of synchronous TAG. With William Schuler and Mark Dras. 2000. In Proc. TAG+5, pages 61–66. [PS] [PDF]
• The weak generative capacity of linear tree adjoining grammars. 2006. In Proc. TAG+8. [PDF]
• Evaluation of Grammar Formalisms for Applications to Natural Language Processing and Biological Sequence Analysis, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2004. Rubinoff Award. [PDF, 600k] Slides from defense: [PDF]
• Uses and abuses of intersected languages. 2004. In Proc. TAG+7, pages 9–15. [PS] [PDF]
• Putting some weakly context-free formalisms in order. 2002. In Proc. TAG+6, pages 11–18. [PS] [PDF]

Software and other stuff

• Hiero, hierarchical phrase-based machine translation system.
• Stochastic TIG parser with configuration files for English and Chinese
• Treep, a tree processor to be used as a front-end for training statistical parsers.
• TeX/MetaPost stuff: some tree-drawing packages