Philip Resnik's Advisees

You may notice that I use the "Dr." title explicitly on this page, which is a bit more formal than typical in computational linguistics. I've done that for a long time when listing my former students, but it became more visibly important in December 2020 with the publication of a Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing Dr. Jill Biden for her use of the title that she earned. I am not dignifying that editorial with a link, but rather I will link this excellent response.

Current advisees and their research

• Rupak Sarkar (CS)
  LinkedIn
  Computational social science, computational pragmatics, conversational AI.

• Sathvik Nair (Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Computational psycholinguistics.

Students awarded the Ph.D. (and where they wound up!)

• Dr. Mona Diab. (Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Mona's 2003 linguistics dissertation,"Word Sense Disambiguation Within a Multingual Framework" , focused on unsupervised word sense disambiguation using parallel corpora. After graduation, she did a postdoc working with Dan Jurafsky at University of Colorado and Stanford University, and has since then held leadership roles in both academia and industry. She is currently Director of the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University. She was designated a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2023.

• Dr. Okan Kolak . (CS)
  LinkedIn
  Okan's 2005 computer science dissertation, "Rapid Resource Transfer for Natural Language Processing" , focused on development of language technology for low-resource languages by taking advantage of existing resources for well-studied languages, with applications in optical character recognition and parsing. He went on to a Staff Research Scientist / Technical Lead Manager role at Google and most recently has been a Member of Technical Staff at Open AI since April 2024.

• Dr. Stephan Greene. (Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  His 2007 linguistics dissertation, Spin: Lexical Semantics, Transitivity, and the Identification of Implicit Sentiment ( short abstract ) focused on the way that the choice of underlying semantic properties of an event description, reflected in syntactic structures, sheds light on the speaker's attitudes about the event, a phenomenon I now call syntactic framing. Ideas and data collection methods in his dissertation are important precursors to work in the Decompositional Semantics Initiative. Stephan was a Senior Software Engineer in the NLP group at Art Technology Group (ATG) while doing his dissertation, and has progressed through a number of other industry roles to his current position as Chief Technology Officer at Converseon.

• Dr. Adam Lopez. (CS)
  LinkedIn
  Adam wrote his 2008 dissertation on "Machine Translation by Pattern Matching", and he also authored a highly regarded survey on Statistical Machine Translation ( ACM Computing Surveys 40(3), Sep 2008). Adam's dissertation broke new ground in the scalability of statistical MT systems, going beyond flat phrase-based representations (e.g. hierarchical phrase-based models) and making it possible to do efficient pattern matching using patterns that contain gaps. He went on to be a postdoctoral research fellow working with Philipp Koehn on statistical machine translation at the University of Edinburgh, and after intervening positions in academia and industry he is now a Reader (equivalent to Associate Professor in the U.S.) at the University of Edinburgh.

• Dr. Yuval Marton. (Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Yuval's 2009 dissertation, entitled “Fine-Grained Linguistic Soft Constraints on Statistical Natural Language Processing Models”, focused on using soft syntactic and semantic constraints in end-to-end state-of-the-art statistical machine translation systems. He also introduced a novel distributional paraphrase generation technique based on monolingual phrase similarity. Yuval went on to be a post-doctoral researcher at the Columbia University Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS), working with Nizar Habash and Owen Rambow on syntactic parsing, focusing on Arabic parsing for statistical machine translation; he then worked in a variety of industry positions and is now Senior Principal NLP Data Scientist at Genentec.

• Dr. Chris Dyer. (Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Chris's 2010 dissertation defined a new framework for modeling ambiguity, with particular application to (but far from limited to) statistical machine translation. The key idea is to move from strings to weighted sets when thinking about the inputs, outputs, and gold-standard references for supervised training in an NLP pipeline. This turns out to be a really powerful way of looking at processing, leading to empirical, algorithmic, and even theoretical (a theorem proved!) contributions. Chris did a postdoc with Noah Smith at CMU's LTI and was then faculty at CMU; he is now Senior Staff Scientist at Google DeepMind in London.

• Dr. Chang Hu (CS, co-advised with Ben Bederson).
  LinkedIn
  Chang's 2012 dissertation developed the idea of monolingual translation, using human-computer interaction insights, crowdsourcing, and underlying machine translation technology to create a system in which crowds of monolingual users can help each other to translate text -- in an environment where nobody is assumed to know both the source and target language. Then he moved to be a Research Software Development Engineer at Microsoft. Chang is now a Staff Software Engineer at Compass.

• Dr. Vlad Eidelmann. (CS)
  LinkedIn
  Vlad's 2013 dissertation advanced online discriminative learning methods in machine translation, with applicability to other large scale structured prediction problems. After graduation he became Principal Scientist at FiscalNote, and helped lead that company to its debut on the NY Stock Exchange at a $1.2B valuation, having risen to roles as Chief Scientist, Head of AI Research, and Chief Technology Officer. As of February 2025 he has left his full-time roles at FiscalNote and is serving as their Senior Strategic Advisor for AI and Emerging Technologies.

• Dr. Viet-An Nguyen. (CS, co-advised with Jordan Boyd-Graber)
  LinkedIn
  An's 2015 thesis focused on developing probabilistic topic models for applications in natural language processing and computational social science, with particular application to computational political science. Then he moved to Facebook and he is now a Research Scientist in the Central Applied Science team at Meta, working on computational methods to study interesting latent structures extracted from observed data.

• Dr. Allyson Ettinger (Linguistics, co-advised with Colin Phillips)
  LinkedIn
  Allyson's 2018 dissertation, "Relating Lexical and Syntactic Processes in Language: Bridging Research in Humans and Machines", focused on the nature of the relationship between low-level lexical processes and syntactically-driven interpretation processes, via a combination of computational and psycholinguistics methods. After a postdoc at Toyota Technical Institute and being on the faculty at University of Chicago, she is now a Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2).

• Dr. Weiwei Yang (CS, co-advised with Jordan Boyd-Graber)
  LinkedIn
  Wewei's 2019 dissertation focused on topic modeling in computational social science. He went on to Meta as a Senior Research Scientist, and is now leading the Algorithm & Framework Team at Zhejiang Lab ( Research Center for High Efficiency Computing System ).

• Dr. Thang Nguyen (CS, co-advised with Jordan Boyd-Graber)
  LinkedIn
  Thang's 2019 thesis, Rich and Scalable Models for Text, introduced a series of spectral models to permit more efficient and flexible capabilities in topic modeling. He has held a number of industry positions and is currently a Senior Applied Scientist at Zillow.

• Dr. Han-chin Shing (CS, co-advised with Doug Oard)
  LinkedIn
  Han's 2021 dissertation, A Human-Centric Approach to NLP in Healthcare Applications, focused on NLP and machine learning for clinical and mental health applications. He went on to a research position at Amazon Comprehend Medical, where most recently has has been focused on AWS Health AI developing AI and NLP solutions for healthcare.

• Joe Barrow (CS, co-advised with Doug Oard)
  LinkedIn
  Joe's 2022 dissertation, Structural Scaffolding for Sensemaking in Document Collections, introduced NLP and deep learning methods to support readers in making sense of large quantities of document-based information. He went on to a position as Research Scientist in the Document Intelligence Lab at Adobe and is currently leading machine learning and NLP at Pattern Data, an intelligence platform for companies and law firms to automate and improve the accuracy ofevaluating legal cases.

• Pranav Goel (CS)
  LinkedIn
  Pranav's 2023 dissertation, Analyzing Communicative Choices to Understand Their Motivations, Context-Based Variation, and Social Consequences, introduced unsupervised NLP methods to study texts in order to effectively explicate the communicative choices being made, as well as to investigate their potential motivations, context-based variation, and consequences. He went onto a postdoc with David Lazer at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, focusing on NLP and computational social science.

• Alexander Hoyle (CS)
  LinkedIn
  Alexander's 2024 dissertation,Developing and Measuring Latent Constructs in Text, introduced NLP methods and evaluations to facilitate the development and measurement of latent constructs from natural language, while remaining sensitive to social sciences' need for interpretability and validity. He is now a Postdoctoral Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at ETH Zürich AI Center.

Former postdocs (and where they wound up!)

Note that although I do my best to follow folks and keep up to date, not all the information here is necessarily current!

• Dr. Rebecca Hwa (postdoc, co-advised; PhD, Harvard, 2001)
  LinkedIn
  Learning algorithms for cross-language processing and machine translation. After positions at Pitt and NSF she is now Professor and Chair of Computer Science at The George Washington University.

• Dr. David Chiang (postdoc, PhD UPenn, 2004)
  Statistical machine translation. After his postdoc he went on to research roles at USC Information Sciences Institute. Now Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, at Notre Dame.

• Dr. Smaranda Muresan (postdoc; PhD, Columbia 2006)
  LinkedIn
  Statistical machine translation. She went on to join the faculty at Rutgers in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers, from there to faculty at Columbia, and she is now Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Barnard College, Columbia University.

• Dr. Jordan Boyd-Graber (postdoc, PhD Princeton, 2009)
  LinkedIn
  Machine learning. Started as an assistant professor at UMD's iSchool in Fall 2010, then moved to University of Colorado CS department, and returned to University of Maryland in 2017, where he is now full professor in CS with joint appointments at the iSchool and the Language Science Center.

• Dr. Kristy Hollingshead (postdoc; PhD with Brian Roark at OGI)
  LinkedIn
  Statistical machine translation. Went on to roles in government and industry, now Senior Data Science Lead at Further.

• Dr. Hendra Setiawan (postdoc; PhD School of Computing, National University of Singapore )
  LinkedIn
  Statistical machine translation. Went on to research roles at IBM, then BBN, and now Language Technology R&D Scientist/Engineer at Apple.

• Dr. Junhui Li (postdoc 2014; PhD at Soochow University 2010).
  Statistical machine translation. Now Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University.

• Dr. Amittai Axelrod (postdoc; PhD with Xiaodong He and Mari Ostendorf at University of Washington)
  LinkedIn
  Machine translation; data selection for machine learning. Went on to industry research positions at Amazon Translate, Didi, and now a Senior Scientist at Apple.

• Dr. Hadi Amiri (postdoc 2016; PhD with Tat-Seng Chua, National University of Singapore)
  LinkedIn
  NLP, deep learning, and social media analysis. Went on to be a research fellow at Harvard in clinical applications, and is now Assistant Professor in the Miner School of Computer & Information Sciences at University of Massachusetts (UMass) Lowell.

• Dr. Shohini Bhattasali (Linguistics/UMIACS postdoc)
  LinkedIn
  Computational cognitive neuroscience of language. Went on to current position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Language Studies and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto.

Other former advisees etc. (and where they wound up!)

Note that although I do my best to follow folks and keep up to date, not all the information here is necessarily current!

• David Alexander (Master's degree in Applied Math)
  LinkedIn
  Effect of topic classification on word sense discriminability. Was at Census Bureau, then BBN.

• Aitziber Atutxa (Master's degree in Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Basque NLP; semantics/syntax interface. Now an Associate Professor at The University of the Basque Country. ( publications )

• Clara Cabezas (Master's degree in Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Word sense disambiguation. Now a Spanish Teacher in The Madeira School.

• Aaron Elkiss (undergraduate)
  LinkedIn
  Linguist's Search Engine. After completing his undergraduate degree, worked with me at UMD full time on the Linguist's Search Engine project, the ICDL Communities project, and statistical machine translation. Then got master's in CS at University of Michigan, moved on to location-based services at a "stealth-mode" startup, and is now working as a Enterprise Architect in HathiTrust.

• Ed Kenschaft (Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Word sense disambiguation and lexical selection in MT. Federal Solutions Engineer at Basis Technology as of 2019.

• Rafi Khan (CS 2004)
  LinkedIn
  Linguist's Search Engine. Now an Engineering Manager at Google.

• Greg Marton (CS).
  LinkedIn
  Various NLP topics. Spent time at the AI Lab at MIT; now Tutor for Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, primarily via Wyzant, and Visiting Professor at Tufts University.

• Jesse Metcalf-Burton (undergraduate)
  Linguist's Search Engine. Went on to a Ph.D, in Mathematics at the University of Michigan.

• Mike Nossal (NLP research programmer)
  Went on to be a senior NLP developer at CodeRyte, healthcare NLP and machine learning. Now a Seattle based NLP/Software engineer for Providence Health System.

• Grazia Russo-Lassner (Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Paraphrase. Now Senior Consultant, Natural Language AI Services at Amazon Web Services.

• Aga Skotowski (Master's degree)
  Went on to work in NLP research at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), and MetaCarta.

• Noah Smith (Linguistics and CS).
  LinkedIn
  Translation detection and mining the Web for parallel text. Went on to be a computer science Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins, and a Hertz Foundation Fellow, then faculty at CMU, now Professor of CS & Engineering at University of Washington and Senior Director of NLP Research at the Allen Institute for AI.

• Jessica Stevens (undergraduate in CS)
  Supervised word sense disambiguation. Now working in NLP research at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN).

• Tim Hunter (PhD student in linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Explored ideas in statistical machine translation. He shifted to a linguistics dissertation in syntax, did postdocs at Yale and Cornell, and became an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota; he's now an Associate Professor at UCLA.

• Tim Hawes (Master's in linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Sentiment analysis and deliberative discourse (co-advised with Jimmy Lin). Now Staff Scientist (Member of Technical Staff ) at Cohere.

• Ederlyn Lacson (Linguistics and CS)
  LinkedIn
  Psycholinguistic methods exploring sentiment analysis. Now Software Development Engineer at Microsoft.

• Olivia Buzek (Linguistics and CS)
  LinkedIn
  Crowdsourcing, paraphrase, and translation. Went on to be a PhD student at Johns Hopkins; now Program Director / Senior Technical Staff Member - watsonx.ai, OIC - IBM Research.

• Eric Hardisty (Master degree in CS 2011)
  LinkedIn
  Computational modeling for sentiment analysis. Now a DoD contractor (Senior Executive).

• Yakov Kronrod (PhD student in Linguistics 2014)
  LinkedIn
  Crowdsourcing and translation, MT aspects. Shifted topics and completed his PhD in Linguistics with Naomi Feldman; now Senior Machine Learning Engineering Manager at Spotify.

• Brianna (Satinoff) Greenberg (master's degree in CS, co-advised with Jimmy Lin)
  LinkedIn
  Topic modeling and visualization. Now Specialist in Advanced Software Development at 3M.

• Michael Subotin (PhD student in linguistics, co-advised with Amy Weinberg 2010)
  LinkedIn
  Machine learning and statistical machine translation. Now Sr Research Engineering Specialist / Tech Lead at Solventum.

• Isaac Julien (Master's degree in CS 2014)
  LinkedIn
  Went on to Epic (electronic medical records), now Senior Software Engineer at Google.

• Peter Enns (PhD student in Linguistics)
  LinkedIn
  Went to Amazon as a Software Development Engineer II Now Senior Software Engineer at Amazon.

• Ke Wu (PhD student in CS)
  LinkedIn
  Now a Software Engineer at Google.

• Meir Friedenberg (CS undergraduate)
  Went on to complete his PhD in CS at Cornell, now Machine Learning Scientist at Wayfair.

• Andrew Hian-Cheong (CS master's 2020)
  LinkedIn
  Now CTO & Co-Founder at Trustible.ai.