I am a Ph.D student at the Language Technologies Institute, a department of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

My current work is researching new technologies that allow the development of better speech recognition software.  This is an important area of research because speech and language are perhaps the most natural modes of communication for people, but so difficult for computers to interpret.  Among other reasons, speech recognition is hard because a computer, telephone, or device has no faculty for understanding the meaning in the language.

My work is on figuring out how to encode some of the meaningful information that may help guide speech recognition.  For example, determining the topic spoken about will make some words much more likely than others.  When speaking about the petroleum market, “Iran” is more likely than “it ran,” when speaking to customer service about an iPod “music” is more likely than “lose it.”

For this work, I collaborate with my research adviser Dr. Scott Fahlman, who specializes in how to represent knowledge in a computer software, and Dr. Bhiksha Raj, who specializes in automatic recognition of spoken language.

In addition to speech recognition, I have research experience in natural language processing, knowledge representation, machine learning, information extraction, and information retrieval.  Before coming to CMU in 2005, I completed an MS at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (thesis adviser: Dan Roth), and my BS at University of Massachusetts Amherst (thesis adviser: Andrew McCallum).  In my spare time I enjoy softball, Mozart, and theater.