David Chiang

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2004. Advisor: Aravind K. Joshi. Dissertation: Evaluation of Grammar Formalisms for Applications to Natural Language Processing and Biological Sequence Analysis
• S.M. in Computer Science, Harvard University, 1997.
• A.B. cum laude in Computer Science, Harvard University, 1997.

Honors and awards

• 2005: Best paper award, 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• 2005: Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award, University of Pennsylvania, for a dissertation that represents an advance in innovative application of computer technology
• Phi Beta Kappa (fall 1996) and Detur Book Prize, Harvard University, awarded to top 5% of class

Professional experience

• July 2007–present: Research assistant professor, USC Department of Computer Science.
• Jan 2006–present: Research scientist, USC Information Sciences Institute.
• Summer 2005: Senior researcher, Johns Hopkins CLSP Summer Workshop.
• Sep 2004–Dec 2005: Postdoctoral research associate, Univ. of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.
• Sep 1997–Aug 2004: Research assistant, University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science.
• 1995–1996: Research assistant, Harvard University Department of Computer Science.

Teaching experience

• Fall 2007 and 2008: Instructor, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Univ. of Southern California, with K. Knight
• Spring 2007 and 2008: Instructor, Natural Language Processing, Univ. of Southern California, with E. Hovy et al.
• Fall 2005: Instructor, Computational Linguistics I, Univ. of Maryland, with Philip Resnik
• Spring 1999: Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Cognitive Science, Univ. of Pennsylvania
• Fall 1998: Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Programming, Univ. of Pennsylvania
• Spring 1997: Teaching Fellow, Principles of Programming Languages, Harvard University
• Summer 1996: Teaching Fellow, Introduction to Computer Science Using C++, Harvard Summer School

Publications

Journal articles

• D. Chiang, 2007. Hierarchical phrase-based translation. Computational Linguistics 33(2):201–228.
• K. A. Dill, A. Lucas, J. Hockenmaier, L. Huang, D. Chiang, and A. K. Joshi, 2007. Computational linguistics: a new tool for exploring biopolymer structures and statistical mechanics. Polymer 48:4289–4300.
• D. Chiang, A. K. Joshi, and D. B. Searls, 2006. Grammatical representations of macromolecular structure. J. Computational Biology 13(5):1077–1100.
• D. Chiang, A. K. Joshi, and K. A. Dill, 2006. A grammatical theory for the conformational changes of simple helix bundles. J. Computational Biology 13(1):21–42.
• M. Dras, D. Chiang, and W. Schuler, 2004. On relations of constituency and dependency grammars. Research on Language and Computation 2(2):281–305.

Refereed conference papers

• D. Chiang, Y. Marton, and P. Resnik, 2008. Online large-margin training of syntactic and structural translation features. In Proc. EMNLP, pages 224–233.
• D. Chiang, S. DeNeefe, Y. S. Chan, and H. T. Ng, 2008. Decomposability of translation metrics for improved evaluation and efficient algorithms. In Proc. EMNLP, pages 610–619.
• H. Zhang, D. Gildea, and D. Chiang. 2008. Extracting synchronous grammar rules from word-level alignments in linear time. In Proc. COLING.
• L. Huang and D. Chiang, 2007. Forest rescoring: faster decoding with integrated language models. Proc. ACL.
• Y. S. Chan, H. T. Ng, and D. Chiang, 2007. Word sense disambiguation improves statistical machine translation. Proc. ACL, pages 33–40.
• D. Chiang, M. Diab, N. Habash, O. Rambow, and S. Shareef, 2006. Parsing Arabic dialects. In Proc. EACL, Trento, pages 369–376.
• D. Chiang, A. Lopez, N. Madnani, C. Monz, P. Resnik, and M. Subotin, 2005. The Hiero machine translation system: extensions, evaluation, and analysis. In Proceedings of HLT/EMNLP, Vancouver, pages 779–786.
• D. Chiang, 2005. A hierarchical phrase-based model for statistical machine translation. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Ann Arbor, MI, pages 263–270. Best paper award.
• D. Chiang, 2003. Mildly context sensitive grammars for estimating maximum entropy models. In Proceedings of Formal Grammar 2003, Vienna, August. CSLI Publications.
• D. Chiang and D. M. Bikel, 2002. Recovering latent information in treebanks. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING2002), Taipei, August, pages 183–189.
• D. Chiang and A. K. Joshi, 2002. Formal grammars for estimating partition functions of double-stranded chain molecules. Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference (HLT 2002), San Diego, March, pages 63–67.
• D. Chiang, 2001. Constraints on strong generative power. In Proceedings of ACL '01, Toulouse, July, pages 124–131.
• D. Chiang, 2000. Statistical parsing with an automatically-extracted tree adjoining grammar. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2000), Hong Kong, October, pages 456–463.
• W. Schuler, D. Chiang, and M. Dras, 2000. Multi-component TAG and notions of formal power. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2000), Hong Kong, October, pages 448–455.

Refereed workshop papers

• D. Chiang, 2006. The weak generative capacity of linear tree adjoining grammars. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+8), Sydney, July.
• D. Chiang and O. Rambow, 2006. The hidden TAG model: synchronous grammars for parsing resource-poor languages. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+8), Sydney, July, pages 1–8.
• L. Huang and D. Chiang, 2005. Better k-best parsing. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Parsing Technology, Vancouver, October, pages 53–64.
• D. Chiang, 2004. Uses and abuses of intersected languages. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+7), Vancouver, May.
• D. Chiang, 2002. Putting some weakly context-free formalisms in order. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+6), Venice, May, pages 11–18.
• D. M. Bikel and D. Chiang, 2000. Two statistical parsing models applied to the Chinese Treebank. In Proceedings of the Second Chinese Language Processing Workshop, Hong Kong, October, pages 1–6.
• M. Dras, D. Chiang, and W. Schuler, 2000. A multi-level TAG approach to dependency. In Proceedings of the ESSLLI-2000 Workshop on Linguistic Theory and Grammar Implementation, Birmingham, UK, August, pages 33–46.
• D. Chiang, W. Schuler, and M. Dras, 2000. Some remarks on an extension of synchronous TAG. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+5), Paris, May, pages 61–66.

Other papers

• D. Chiang, K. A. Dill, A. K. Joshi, 2003. Estimating partition functions of helix bundles using context-free grammars. Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Alliance Retreat, poster session, 24 October, pages 37–38.
• D. Chiang. 2003. Statistical parsing with an automatically extracted tree adjoining grammar, In R. Bod et al., editors, Data Oriented Parsing. CSLI Publications, Stanford, pages 299–316.
• F.-D. Chiou, D. Chiang, and M. Palmer, 2001. Facilitating treebank annotation using a statistical parser. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference (HLT 2001), poster session, San Diego, March, pages 117–120.

Invited presentations

• Online large-margin training of syntactic and structural translation features. Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing, 16 September 2008.
• Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, 19 and 26 September 2007.
• Harvard University Computer Science Colloquium, 9 November 2006.
• ACL 2006 tutorial on Synchronous Grammars and Tree Transducers, with K. Knight, 16 July 2006.
• National University of Singapore, School of Computing, 11 Apr 2006.
• NIPS 2005 Workshop on Advances in Structured Learning for Text and Speech Processing, 9 December 2005.
• NYU Department of Computer Science, 16 September 2005.
• USC Information Sciences Institute, 6 July 2005.
• Google, Inc., 13 June 2005.
• From phrase-based towards syntax-based machine translation. JHU CLSP, 8 Feb 2005.
• Sizing up formal grammars for statistical parsing and translation. Language Weaver, Inc., 3 June 2004.
• Putting formal grammars to work. Univ. of MD Inst. for Advanced Computer Studies, Computational Linguistics Colloquium, 26 April 2004.
• Formal grammars for biological sequence analysis. NYU Department of Computer Science, 12 April 2002.
• Extracting tree adjoining grammars for statistical parsing of English and Chinese. Univ. of MD Inst. for Advanced Computer Studies, Computational Linguistics Colloquium, 15 August 2001.

Professional activities

• Local organizer for NAACL HLT 2010, with E. Hovy, J. May, and J. Riesa
• PhD thesis committees: Adam Lopez, 2008; Hendra Setiawan, 2008; Jonathan May
• Editorial board, Computational Linguistics, 2006–2008
• Guest editor, ACM Trans. Asian Language Information Processing Special Issue on Machine Translation
• Area chair: ACL 2006, 2008 (machine translation and multilinguality); EMNLP/CoNLL 2007 (machine translation)
• Organizer, NAACL Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation, 2007–2009
• Reviewer: ACL, HLT, EACL, NIPS, EMNLP, IJCAI.
• Reviewer, Computational Linguistics, J. Artificial Intelligence Research, J. Natural Language Engineering
• NSF review panelist, bioinformatics, 2002
• Member, Association for Computational Linguistics

Other information

• Citizenship: U.S.
• Languages: English (native), Mandarin Chinese (basic), ancient Latin and Greek (reading)