Andrew Carlson

I am a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Machine Learning Department, within the School of Computer Science. My advisor is Tom Mitchell. My research focuses on mining the Web for facts and information. I am particularly interested in building large-scale, minimally-supervised information extraction systems that can extract large repositories of facts from web text. This work is part of the Read the Web project. I proposed a thesis entitled "Coupled Semi-Supervised Learning" in May 2009, and aim to graduate in the second half of 2010. Some preliminary results from this work are presented in the paper "Coupling Semi-Supervised Learning of Categories and Relations". Additional work will be presented at WSDM 2010 in February.

I also contributed to Professor Mitchell's work on machine learning and fMRI brain imaging data. The results of that work can be found in the Science paper "Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns".

I am thankful for support from Yahoo! for my research in 2007-2009 through the PhD Student Fellowship Program. I was an intern with Yahoo!'s Data Mining and Research group, working with Scott Gaffney and Flavian Vasile, in the summer of 2008. Yahoo! has also been extremely helpful by providing CMU with access to its M45 computing cluster. The cluster has enabled web-scale research outside of corporations. Without it, I'd be unable to pursue my current line of research. I wrote a blog post with Justin Betteridge on Yahoo!'s Hadoop blog describing one way in which we've used M45 and Hadoop in our research.

I spent the summer of 2007 on an internship at Google in Pittsburgh working with Charles Schafer. A publication from that work was presented at ECML/PKDD 2008.

In the summer of 2006, I coordinated a reading group on semi-supervised natural language learning research.

Previously, I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I received a B.S. in Computer Science. I researched machine learning applied to natural language under Professor Dan Roth, as part of the Cognitive Computation Group. I also released and maintained the SNoW software package.

Publications

• "Coupled Semi-Supervised Learning for Information Extraction," A. Carlson, J. Betteridge, R. C. Wang, E. R. Hruschka Jr. and T. M. Mitchell, To appear in Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 2010.
• "Populating the Semantic Web by Macro-Reading Internet Text," T. M. Mitchell, J. Betteridge, A. Carlson, E. R. Hruschka Jr., and R. C. Wang, Invited paper, Proceedings of the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), 2009.
• "Coupling Semi-Supervised Learning of Categories and Relations," A. Carlson, J. Betteridge, E. R. Hruschka Jr. and T. M. Mitchell, Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2009 Workshop on Semi-supervised Learning for Natural Language Processing, 2009.
• "Toward Never Ending Language Learning," J. Betteridge, A. Carlson, S. A. Hong, E. R. Hruschka Jr., E. L. M. Law, T. M. Mitchell, S. H. Wang, Proceedings of the 2009 AAAI Spring Symposium on Learning by Reading and Learning to Read, 2009.
• "Learning a Named Entity Tagger from Gazetteers with the Partial Perceptron", A. Carlson, S. Gaffney, and F. Vasile, Proceedings of the 2009 AAAI Spring Symposium on Learning by Reading and Learning to Read, 2009.
• "Bootstrapping Information Extraction from Semi-structured Web Pages," A. Carlson and C. Schafer, Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD), 2008.
• "Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns," T. M. Mitchell, S. V. Shinkareva, A. Carlson, K.M. Chang, V. L. Malave, R. A. Mason, and M. A. Just, Science 320, May 30, 2008, 1161-1165. Supporting Online Material. Supporting website.
• "On the Chance Accuracies of Large Collections of Classifiers," M. Palatucci and A. Carlson, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2008.
• "Memory-Based Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction at Web Scale," A. Carlson and I. Fette, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 2007.
• "Scaling Up Context Sensitive Text Correction," A. Carlson, J. Rosen, and D. Roth, Proceedings of the The Thirteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI), 2001.
• "The SNoW Learning Architecture," A. Carlson, C. Cumby, J. Rosen, and D. Roth (1999). Technical Report UIUCDCS-R-99-2101, UIUC Computer Science Department, May, 1999. (latest version)

Contact Information

Office:   Gates Hillman Center 8015

Email:   acarlson AT cs.cmu.edu

Other Interests

• I started getting into photography in 2008. I have put a lot of pictures up on Flickr.
• I also enjoy cooking. I highly recommend the cookbooks (and blogs) of Mark Bittman.
• I've played music for many years. I'm most proficient at guitar. My most recent passion is Gypsy jazz.