I am an assistant professor of Linguistics at UC Davis, and co-director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory.I was a co-founder of KITT.AI, a startup acquired by Baidu.Until October of 2015 I was a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Computer Science Department, and a Research Scientist and Project Leader at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. I taught CSCI 544 Applied Natural Language Processing, and supervised a research group on computational models of natural language structure consisting of a few students and a senior research associate.
Before joining USC I was a member of Tsujii Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. At Tsujii Lab, I worked on combining discriminative dependency parsing with HPSG, and on applying syntactic parsing in bioinformatics.
I got my PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. My thesis advisors were Alon Lavie (LTI) and Brian MacWhinney (Psychology). The other members of my thesis committee were Lori Levin (LTI), Jaime Carbonell (LTI), and John Carroll (University of Sussex, Department of Informatics).
My research at CMU involved the identification of grammatical relations, or GRs, (such as subjects, objects and adjuncts) in corpora of transcribed dialogues between children and parents. Most of these transcripts came from the CHILDES Database, but I also worked with transcripts from other sources.