Main profile

Amittai

Axelrod

Interests: 

Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation, Translation

Projects: 

CLIP

Units: 

UMIACS

Degree(s): 

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

Contact: 

amittai at umd.edu

3155 A.V. Williams

Role(s): 

Postdoc

About: 

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.

Collaborators: 

 

Philip Resnik
Hal Daumé III