Each of our team members brings a unique perspective from their extensive backgrounds in linguistics, computer science, and natural language processing. Our team advisor, Marie Meteer, is an accomplished computer scientist who has worked in NLP and speech recognition for more than 25 years. Our vision is to bring together cutting edge components of computational linguistics and AI in our socialbot. We intend to build a personality that can reflect on its social environment and engage a user in thoughtful conversation.
Sasha S. - Team leader
Sasha graduated from the University of Southern California in 2016 with a BS in Computational Linguistics, where she focused specifically on psycholinguistics research. Her undergraduate research, "Speakers' rapidly-updated expectations influence prosodic realization of information structure" will be presented as a talk at the 2017 LSA conference. Her current areas of interest are in processing subtextual information, like interest and emotion, and recreating them artificially. She is specifically intrigued by how continually updated contextual information can be modeled computationally.
Alex L.
Alex is a PhD student, having finished his master degree in Computational Linguistics in May 2016. His research interests include deep semantic representations, computational models of discourse, and the application of Human Language Technology in Language Education. His goal is to leverage the state-of- the-art NLP techniques to develop dialog systems that provide language learners with personalized interactions to improve their communicative competence. This is vividly reflected in his master thesis, “Toward robust semantic interaction for English language learners”, and his team’s speech application project “Mirror- Mirror,” which won second prize in AVIOS 2015/2016 Speech Application Contest.
Chester P.M.
Chester received a BA in Spanish Education from Kent State University. He taught English as a second language at Kent State for 4 years before coming to Brandeis to pursue his interest in computational linguistics. While teaching at Kent State, he took a variety of computer science classes including Machine Learning where he completed a project classifying tweets and Database System Design where he completed a team project on a healthcare database system.
Jennifer S.
Jennifer earned a BS in Business Administration and a BA in Chinese from American University, magna cum laude. She then spent the next two years teaching English as a second language in Korea and working as a professional Korean-English translator, where she became interested in second language acquisition and machine translation. Jennifer is excited to pursue her interests in natural language processing, machine translation and speech recognition while working towards a master's degree in Computational Linguistics at Brandeis University. She speaks four languages: English, Mandarin, Korean and Japanese.
Nicholas M.
Nicholas is a master's student in the Computational Linguistics program. He completed a BA in linguistics at Georgetown University in 2010. After further studies in China and Korea, he worked for five years as a Mandarin teacher and world language department head at Saigon South International School in Vietnam. His research interests include using machine learning techniques to facilitate human-computer interaction.
Tuan D.
Tuan finished his Masters in Computer Science in January 2014 and started working on Computational Linguistics for his PhD track at the same time. His research interests include computational lexical semantics, temporal and spatial expression extraction from text and application of big-data framework for knowledge-base building. His main research work now is in Communicating with Computer (CwC), a DARPA project. His dissertation topic is to apply machine learning methods to achieve multi-model (textual and visual) representations and understandings of lexical semantics.
Will B.
Will is a first-year student in the CL MA program, having graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2014 with a B.A. with Honors in Linguistics. During his time at UCSC, Will studied Python, natural language processing, and multiple courses in semantics and pragmatics. Will has joined Brandeis’s program to further his education and pursue his interest in NLP, machine translation, and artificial intelligence. Will is currently taking courses in Python, NLTK, and Java, and is a research assistant on a project annotating VP ellipsis, as well as TA-ing classes in the department.
Marie Meteer - Faculty advisor
Dr. Meteer is Associate Professor and Industry Liaison in the Computer Science Department. She has over 25 years’ experience in speech, language modeling, information extraction, and dialog and consults in industries ranging from mobile application development, to medical transcription, to patent research. She was a co-founder and Vice President of Speech at EveryZing, a digital media merchandising platform, and spent 20 years at BBN Technologies in positions ranging from research scientist to Vice President of Commercial Speech Solutions. Dr. Meteer received her Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Massachusetts.
