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Ph.D., 2014, Electrical Engineering, University of Washington
MSEE, Electrical Engineering, University of Washington
M.Sc. by Research, Informatics, University of Edinburgh
B.Sc., Computer Science, MIT
B.Sc., Mathematics, MIT
The core problem I'm interested in working on is that of using existing resources effectively. My primary field is statistical machine translation: building statistical systems to automatically translate text from one human language to another.
I am particularly interested in systems that are task-oriented: travel scenarios, real-time telephone conversations, or particular kinds of documents. These tasks have an implicit distribution of language or linguistic features that differ from the language as a whole. My work quantifies how these distributions are different, and then leverages that difference to build better task-oriented translation systems. The idea is generalizable: Given a natural language processing task, one could use these methods to identify the most relevant data available, and then train a task-specific system.