Philip Resnik
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News flash (December 2008): I have just added
What kind of student are you looking for? to my
FAQ for prospective students.
News flash (November 2008): Brief interview on Federal News Radio discussing cloud computing and its relevance to language technology. News flash (October 2008): Press release on a new project! News flash (September 2008): Speaking of new projects, Alec Jay Resnik (we're calling him Jay) was born last week! Everyone's doing fine. I'm not taking any official time off, though I may be a bit less responsive than usual to e-mail for the next few weeks.
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I do research in computational linguistics, with interests both in the modeling of human linguistic processes (especially lexical semantics, lexical acquisition, and on-line sentence processing) and in the application of natural language processing techniques to practical problems such as cross-language searching and machine translation. My general research agenda for language technology is to improve the state of the art by finding the right balance between knowledge-free statistical modeling and linguistically informed techniques -- and in so doing, to obtain a better scientific understanding of human language itself.
My recent work has largely been focused on machine translation and multilingual natural language processing, exploiting parallel corpora and linguistically informed modeling in statistical machine translation and in multilingual natural language processing more generally (with a focus on Chinese and Arabic, as well as other less-studied languages). As part of this effort, my postdoc David Chiang (now at USC/ISI) developed Hiero, the first syntax-based system to demonstrate performance comparable to state-of-the-art statistical MT systems (see 2005 NIST MT Evaluation results). I have been working with a number of students to further improve hierarchical phrase-based translation, and some recent innovations include the introduction of lattice decoding (useful in translation of speech recognition output and also for text translation of morphologically complex languages), development of efficient algorithms for using suffix array representations in hierarchical decoding, and the use of English-to-English translation to create artificial references translations for use in parameter tuning.I have also been ramping up on work in sentiment analysis, with a particular interest in the connections among lexical semantics, surface linguistic expression, and underlying internal state. For example, why does my toddler say "My toy broke" instead of "I broke my toy"? He's employing "spin" in just the same way that Ronald Reagan did in 1987 when he sidestepped attributing responsibility for the Iran-contra scandal ("Mistakes were made"). My student Dr. Stephan Greene recently completed a fascinating dissertation on this topic, and I'm eagerly pursuing it further.
During the next several years, I hope to re-engage more fully with my interests in computational psycholinguistics. I'm particularly interested in the possibility that ideas from (statistical) information theory may have a useful role to play in explaining why language works the way it does. (This is an idea I first began exploring in my dissertation [ps, pdf].)
See my on-line list of publications for links to papers on the above research topics and more.
Philip Resnik, Associate Professor Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies 1401 Marie Mount Hall UMIACS phone: (301) 405-6760 University of Maryland Linguistics phone: (301) 405-8903 College Park, MD 20742 USA Fax : (301) 405-7104 http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik E-mail: resnik [AT] umd _DOT_ edu UMIACS office: AV Williams 3143 By far the best way to reach me is by e-mail to resnik [AT] umd _DOT_ edu.