I have developed the Soup parser currently being used as ISL's main natural language analysis engine in the C-Star machine translation effort.

My main interest is in Natural Language Understanding, i.e. giving computers the ability to behave as though they understood natural language. (See slides from a lecture I gave about Spoken Language Understanding). More generally, I'm very interested in Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Machine Translation, Knowledge Representation, and Natural Languages.

I love programming: designing complex data structures with lots of pointers and devising algorithms to make them come alive, stacks, trees, priority queues, everything running smoothly like a big engine, dynamic and harmonious, it's like playing (my childhood's favorite toy! (and, needless to say, as soon as my wife and I have a child, we're buying Lego MindStorms' latest Robotics Invention System ;-)) on the computer. Software is this great fuzzy thing between mind and matter... Speaking of which I can't help recommend my current favorite book: The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence W. Deacon.