Contact Information

Email:my last name -atsign- berkeley -dot- edu
Address:525 Soda Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
Phone:
Gchat:papajohn
Office hours:Tues & Thurs, 12:30 - 2:00 pm
in 711 Soda Hall (alcove)

Research

188

I am a member of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group at Berkeley working with Professor Dan Klein. My research focuses on machine translation (MT), the problem of automatically converting one human language into another while maintaining both the meaning and readability of the original text. While this problem has a long history, a recent shift to statistical techniques has led to substantial improvements in translation quality. Google Translate uses the techniques I study, and I'm interning with them this Summer.

My specific research interest lies in training statistical models of translation. The core of modern translation systems are models that discover the relationships between languages from many examples of human-translated sentences. The group website includes some of our recent published work on MT. With Percy Liang, I maintain the Berkeley Aligner, and unsupervised word alignment system. In the future, I also plan to release a syntax-based machine translation pipeline that I have built with other Berkeley students over the last few years.

Publications

2009
2008
2007
2006

My current CV.

Teaching

188

In Spring 2009, I was the instructor for CS 188, Berkeley's introductory artificial intelligence course. Since coming to Berkeley, I have been a GSI for CS 188 several times.

The course is structured around a series of programming projects that I and others developed over the last three years under the supervision of Professor Dan Klein. Several projects involve making decisions in Pacman, a rich and complex environment for testing out AI techniques. These projects are available for use at other colleges and universities; email me for info. Hal Daume III at the University of Utah is trying them out in his AI course this semester.

Teaching Awards

Beyond Academics

188