I am a Senior AI Research engineer with a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University's CLSP (Center for Language and Speech Processing), working on machine learning and natural language.

My interests lie in typologically diverse languages, various kinds of structured prediction, establishing and using clean formalisms, and appreciating neat mathematical models of interesting phenomena and solid engineering.

Recent blog entries

• From PyTorch to JAX: towards neural net frameworks that purify stateful code (2020-03-09)
• Clowning in Pennsylvania (2020-03-02)
• My name is Sabrina – I'm trans (2019-12-30)
• Can you compare perplexity across different segmentations? (2019-04-23)
• NLP/CL Twitter Megathread (2017-04-08)
• Language diversity in ACL 2004 - 2016 (2016-12-22)
• Describing discontinuous constituents with LCFRS (2016-10-21)

CV (the gist of it)

Ph.D. Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA (09/2017 - 10/2023)

• advised by Prof. Jason Eisner at the CLSP (Center for Language and Speech Processing)
• Thesis: “Building and evaluating open-vocabulary language models”

Internship, Cohere AI, Toronto, Canada (summer of 2022)

• engineering a framework for the scalable training of large language models using JAX and TPUs

Part-time internship, HuggingFace, New York City, NY (summer of 2021)

• tokenization in language modeling

Internship, Facebook AI Research (FAIR), New York City, NY (summer of 2020)

• analyzing (chit-)chat bots, using metacognition to improve linguistic calibration

Internship, Google, New York City, NY (summer of 2019)

• transliteration using pronunciation data and cross-language multi-task approaches

M.Sc. Computer Science, TU Dresden, Germany (finished 07/2017)

• thesis: “Soft matching of terminals for syntactic parsing” (supervised by Prof. Heiko Vogler)

Internship, USC Information Sciences Institute, Los Angeles, CA (summer of 2016)

• machine translation / DARPA LORELEI under Prof. Kevin Knight and Prof. Daniel Marcu
• translating out-of-vocabulary words with unprocessed human-readable dictionaries

B.Sc. Computer Science, TU Dresden, Germany (finished 08/2015)

• thesis: “Extracting and Binarizing probabilistic linear context-free rewriting systems”