Current and Former Students

Current Students

• Bridget McInnes (Ph.D. student, co-advised with John Carlis)
• Varada Kolhatkar (M.S. student)
• Yanbo Xu (M.S. student, co-advised with Kang James )

Alumni

• Mahesh Joshi M.S. August 2006 [co-advised with Rich Maclin]. Now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Language Technologies Institute. Read Mahesh's thesis on Kernel Methods for Word Sense Disambiguation and Abbreviation Expansion in the Medical Domain.

• Apurva Padhye M.S. August 2006. Now a software engineer at Endeca in the Boston area. Read Apurva's thesis on "Comparing Supervised and Unsupervised Classification of Messages in the Enron Email Corpus". As a part of her thesis work, Apurva manually classified more than 3,000 email messages by topic.

• Anagha Kulkarni M.S. July 2006 and former Graduate Research Assistant. Now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Language Technologies Institute. Read Anagha's thesis on Unsupervised Context Discrimination and Automatic Cluster Stopping. See the slides from Anagha's defense. All of the ideas in her thesis have been implemented in the SenseClusters package. You can even experiment with her thesis data. Anagha was an intern at the Mayo Clinic in the Summer of 2005. See her final presentation and report.

• Saiyam Kohli M.S. July 2006. Now working in the Twin Cities at Beckman Coulter. Read Saiyam's report on Introducing an Object Oriented Design to the Ngram Statistics Package. All of Saiyam's work can be found in the Ngram Statistics Package. Saiyam also worked on a project with me in the Summer of 2005 developing WordNet::Similarity::Visual.

• Pratheepan Raveendranathan M.S. July 2005. Now a Lead Business Systems Analyst with the Business Intelligence Group, Global Business Solutions at Ecolab in St. Paul, Minnesota. Read Prath's thesis on Identifying Sets of Related Words from the World Wide Web, and see the slides from Prath's thesis defense. This work is implemented in the GoogleHack package.

• Jason Michelizzi M.S. July 2005 and former Graduate Research Assistant. Now in the Navy, learning to be a fighter pilot. Read Jason's thesis about "Semantic Relatedness Applied to All Words Sense Disambiguation". Jason's method of all words disambiguation is implemented in the Perl module WordNet::SenseRelate::AllWords Jason was also responsible for significant improvements to WordNet::Similarity.

• Justin Chase, B.S. May 2005 and former UROP student. You can see Justin's UROP project about Advanced Searching for Online Resources here.

• Bridget McInnes M.S. December 2004. Now at the University of Minnesota pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Read Bridget's thesis about Extending the Log-Likelihood Ratio to Improve Collocation Identification. You can find Bridget's code to carry this out with NSP here. Bridget was an intern at the Mayo Clinic in the Summers of 2003 and 2004. You can a presentation she made regarding her 2003 internship here.

• Amruta Purandare M.S. August 2004 and former Graduate Research Assistant. Now at the University of Pittsburgh pursuing a Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems. Read Amruta's thesis about Word Sense Discrimination by Clustering Similar Contexts here. All of Amruta's thesis work was done using her SenseClusters package. See the slides from Amruta's thesis defense.

• Saif Mohammad M.S. August 2003. Saif defended his Ph.D. dissertation in January 2008 at the University of Toronto, where Graeme Hirst was his advisor. He is now a post-doc at the University of Maryland, where he is working with Bonnie Dorr. Read Saifs's M.S. thesis about Combining Lexical and Syntactic Features for Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation and find many of the tools used in this work here. You can find all of the sense-tagged text used in this thesis here. See the slides from Saif's thesis defense.

• Siddharth "Sid" Patwardham M.S. August 2003. Now at the University of Utah pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Read Sid's thesis about Incorporating Dictionary and Corpus Information into a Context Vector Measure of Semantic Relatedness here and find the implementation of these ideas here. See the slides from Sid's thesis defense. Sid was an intern at the Mayo Clinic in the Summer of 2003. Read his final report on that experience.

• Brian Rassier, B.S. May 2003 and former Undergraduate Research Assistant and UROP student. Now working at Ing Bank in St. Cloud. See Brian's various projects here.

• Satanjeev "Bano" Banerjee M.S. December 2002 and former Graduate Research Assistant. Now at Carnegie Mellon University pursuing a Ph.D. at the Language Technologies Institute. Read Bano's thesis about Adapting the Lesk Algorithm for Word Sense Disambiguation to WordNet. Find the implementation of these ideas here.

• Nitin Varma, M.S. December 2002. Nitin is now in Baltimore, working for the software QA group at CitiFinancial. Read Nitin's thesis about extending the Kvec Algorithm for Finding Translations in Parallel Text. One of the results of the thesis is the K-vec++ package, available here! .

• Aditi Paluskar, M.S. November 2001. Now a Software Engineer for Wetfeet in the Bay Area. After graduating from UMD, Aditi went to the University of Missouri-Rolla and earned a Master's in Engineering Management. Read about Aditi's MS project User-Level Control Of Scheduling in a Micro Kernel Operating System ". This involved the use of Solaris Minix, which is still one of my favorite environments for Operating System projects and experiments.

A Few Pictures