I am a final-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. My advisors are Chris Callison-Burch and Ben Van Durme, and I am funded by the NSF GRFP.
My interests lie in applying natural language processing and machine learning to educational applications, such as grammatical error correction, automatic writing assessment, and investigating the impact of teacher feedback on student writing. For my dissertation, I am investigating monolingual sentence rewriting (specifically sentence compression, simplification, and grammatical error correction), and determing best practices for evaluating system output for these tasks.
Before beginning my PhD, I worked in the publishing industry in agenting, production, and editing. This experience inspired me to learn how to develop automatic, statistical methods to evaluate and improve text, and so I began a doctoral degree in computer science, specializing in natural language processing. Additionally, it taught me how to be deadline-oriented, pay attention to details, and assess market needs and package products to meet the intended audience.
After finishing my degree, I hope to find a position at a mission-oriented company where I can use my skills to help advance education in the tech age.
