Position: Professor Pronouns: he/him Office: TCL 305 Phone: 413.597.4251 E-mail: [email protected] Website |
Education
- Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles 2005
- B.A. University of California, Berkeley 2000
Interests
- Machine learning
- Machine translation
- Automated question answering
- Computational typology
Biography
Since completing a Ph.D. on causal inference from Judea Pearl’s Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA, Mark has worked in the academic, industrial, and nonprofit sectors. His career has included postdoctoral research on natural language parsing at Saarland University, research on machine translation at SDL/Language Weaver, and research on automated question answering at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Most recently, he was a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Reed College, where he introduced courses on artificial intelligence and deep learning.
Research
Mark works on a range of problems in machine learning and computational linguistics, and has recent collaborations with computational biologists on predicting properties of proteins using natural language processing techniques. He is currently interested in how to generate artificial languages that can be used as proxies for natural languages, in order to enable the targeted study of how linguistic typology impacts the performance of neural NLP models.