I am now at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Please visit my web page there.
This web page is no longer being updated.
Publications and Research Interests
Curriculum Vitae
Resume
I defended my Ph.D. on July 20th, 2007. I did my graduate studies in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, which is located in Los Angeles. I completed my BA in Computer Science and Economics with a concentration in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
I work on statistical machine translation in the Natural Language Group at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey (near Los Angeles). We use statistical models to implement machine translation from a variety of languages to English. My current research focuses on statistical word alignment.
My advisor is Daniel Marcu.
From June 2003 to May 2004 I had a one year contract at Language Weaver where I managed the development of a machine translation system which automatically creates high quality translations of Arabic documents in English. Managing the transfer of research technology into a commercial product (which had to be robust!) was an interesting experience and I learned a lot.
In the summer of 2003, I took part in an interesting workshop on Syntax for Statistical Machine Translation. Our goal was to incorporate syntactic structure into a phrase-based statistical machine translation system.
I worked at BBN Technologies, in the Speech and Language Processing Group. My last project there was a cross-lingual information retrieval system where the queries were in English and the documents searched were in Arabic.
I speak English, French, German and Spanish, so feel free to write in any of these languages. Arabic is also a possibility, though you will probably wait longer for a response. I also have a personal web site where I keep my resume and information on studying Arabic that I gathered during my year-long stay in the Middle East in 1998.
I used to work in International Development, providing technical assistance to developing countries, and I am still strongly interested in this area and in development economics. I worked on and managed projects for a NGO (non-profit) called SatelLife which involved travel to a number of countries in Eastern and Western Africa, as well as Bolivia and Haiti. I've spent significant time in Germany, Spain, France, Mexico, Yemen and Syria.
USC and Computational Linguistics