Office

Information Sciences Institute 940 [directions]

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

Project Leader (ISI)
Research Assistant Professor (Computer Science)

My research is in natural language processing, the subfield of computer science that aims to enable computers to understand and produce human language. I focus mainly on language translation, and am interested in syntactic parsing and other areas as well. Curriculum vitae

Current and recent activities

• Fall 2013: CSCI 662, Advanced Natural Language Processing.
• Summer internship program 2013 (applications closed).
• North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad
• Summer 2012: Led a small team of researchers to Papua New Guinea to explore how we can use natural language processing to accelerate documentation of endangered languages.
• Spring 2011: New course on statistical machine translation, CSCI 599: Applications of Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation.

Current members of my group

Postdoc

• Dr. Victoria Fossum

PhD students

• Ashish Vaswani
• Hui Zhang
• Tomer Levinboim
• Theerawat (Dome) Songyot

Selected publications

Machine translation

• Decoding with large-scale neural language models improves translation. Ashish Vaswani, Yinggong Zhao, Victoria Fossum, and David Chiang, 2013. To appear in Proc. EMNLP. [pdf]
• Hope and fear for discriminative training of statistical translation models. J. Machine Learning Research 13 (2012): 1159–1187. A few typos corrected, in particular in the definition of the loss function. [pdf]
• Smaller alignment models for better translations: unsupervised word alignment with the l₀ norm. Ashish Vaswani, Liang Huang, and David Chiang, 2012. In Proc. ACL, 311–319. [pdf] [code]
• An exploration of forest-to-string translation: Does translation help or hurt parsing? Hui Zhang and David Chiang, 2012. In Proc. ACL (Vol. 2: Short Papers), 317–321. [pdf]
• Rule Markov models for fast tree-to-string translation. Ashish Vaswani, Haitao Mi, Liang Huang and David Chiang, 2011. In Proc. ACL, 856–864. [pdf] [bib]
• Two easy improvements to lexical weighting. With Steve DeNeefe and Michael Pust, 2011. In Proc. ACL (Vol. 2: Short Papers), 455–460. [pdf] [bib]
• Learning to translate with source and target syntax. 2010. In Proc. ACL, 1443–1452. [pdf] Slides: [pdf, 2.5M]
• Unsupervised syntactic alignment with inversion transduction grammars. Adam Pauls, Dan Klein, David Chiang, and Kevin Knight, 2010. In Proc. NAACL HLT, 118–126. [pdf]
• Fast consensus decoding over translation forests. John DeNero, David Chiang, and Kevin Knight, 2009. In Proc. ACL, 567–575. [pdf]
• 11,001 new features for statistical machine translation. With Wei Wang and Kevin Knight, 2009. In Proc. NAACL HLT, 218–226. Best paper award. [pdf] Slides: [pdf, 2.9M]
• Online large-margin training of syntactic and structural translation features. With Yuval Marton and Philip Resnik, 2008. In Proc. EMNLP, 224–233. [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, 610–619. [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, 144–151. [pdf]
• Word sense disambiguation improves statistical machine translation. Yee Seng Chan, Hwee Tou Ng, and David Chiang, 2007. In Proc. ACL, 33–40. [pdf]
• A hierarchical phrase-based model for statistical machine translation. 2005. In Proc. ACL, 263–270. Best paper award. [pdf]

Other natural language processing

• Language-independent parsing with empty elements. Shu Cai, David Chiang, and Yoav Goldberg, 2011. In Proc. ACL (Vol. 2: Short Papers), 212–216. [pdf] [bib]
• Efficient optimization of an MDL-inspired objective function for unsupervised part-of-speech tagging. Ashish Vaswani, Adam Pauls, and David Chiang, 2010. In Proc. ACL, 209–214. [pdf]
• Bayesian inference for finite-state transducers. With Jonathan Graehl, Kevin Knight, Adam Pauls, and Sujith Ravi, 2010. In Proc. NAACL HLT, 447–455. [pdf]
• The hidden TAG model: synchronous grammars for parsing resource-poor languages. With Owen Rambow, 2006. In Proc. TAG+8, 1–8. [pdf]
• Parsing Arabic dialects. In Proc. EACL. With Mona Diab, Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, and Safiullah Shareef, 2006. [pdf]
• Better k-best parsing. In Proc. IWPT. Liang Huang and David Chiang, 2005. [pdf]
• Recovering latent information in treebanks. With Daniel M. Bikel, 2002. In Proc. COLING, 183–189. [pdf]
• Statistical parsing with an automatically extracted tree adjoining grammar. 2003. In Data Oriented Parsing, CSLI Publications, 299–316. Combines and updates results from two papers, from ACL 2000 and the colocated Chinese workshop. [pdf]

Formal grammars and their applications

• Parsing graphs with hyperedge replacement grammars. With Jacob Andreas, Daniel Bauer, Karl Moritz Hermann, Bevan Jones and Kevin Knight, 2013. In Proc. ACL, 924–932. [pdf] [bib]
• Synchronous grammars: tutorial given at TAG+11, 2012. [pdf]
• Flexible composition and delayed tree-locality. With Tatjana Scheffler, 2008. In Proc. TAG+9, 17–24. [pdf]
• The weak generative capacity of linear tree adjoining grammars. 2006. In Proc. TAG+8, 25–32. [pdf]
• An introduction to synchronous grammars: part of a tutorial given at ACL 2006 with Kevin Knight. Notes: [pdf] Slides: [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] Published as: Grammars for Language and Genes: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Springer, 2012.
• Uses and abuses of intersected languages. 2004. In Proc. TAG+7, 9–15. [pdf]
• Putting some weakly context-free formalisms in order. 2002. In Proc. TAG+6, 11–18. [pdf]
• Some remarks on an extension of synchronous TAG. With William Schuler and Mark Dras, 2000. In Proc. TAG+5, 61–66. [pdf]

Biological sequence analysis

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

Software and other stuff

• Python bindings for SRI-LM
• Python module for sparse vectors
• tikz-qtree, package for drawing trees in TikZ. Manual [pdf]
• Treep, a tree processor to be used as a front-end for training statistical parsers.
• Stochastic TIG parser with configuration files for English and Chinese
• Scrabble stuff