Ph.D. Students PhD Students (internal and external, supervision and collaboration) 2005-2008 Supervision Reut Tsarfaty (UvA, NWO MOSAIEK project): graduation around March/April 2009 2007-2010 Supervision Markos Mylonakis (UvA, NWO VIDI financed project) 2006-2008 Co-Supervision  Hany Hassan (Dublin City University) PROSPECT project (together with prof. Andy Way): graduation Nov/Dec 2008 2006-2009 Co-Supervision/collab. Ventsislav Zhechev (Dublin City University) ATTEMPT project (together with prof. Andy Way and dr. Mary Hearne) Postdocs Sep/Oct 2008 - 2010: Tejaswini Deoskar (0.5fte postdoc and 05fte lecturer substituting for myself in teaching Stat. NLP courses). Vacancy (2 years -- Project Priors for Estimating Probabilistic Grammars from Incomplete Data )   Lecturer 2007-2008 Temporarily Yoav Seginer -- substituting  lecturer for my statistical NLP courses Previous postdocs Detlef Prescher (2003-2006 -- Project LeStoGram Consistent Statistical Estimation from Treebanks)

Projects General Description of Research Interest Priors for Estimating Probabilistic Grammars from Incomplete Data  (NWO-EW - VIDI)  [2007-2011] Involving: 0.5 FTE lecturer  4.5 years (Yoav Seginer) 1.0 FTE postdoc position 3 years (vacancy) 1.0 FTE PhD position (Markos Mylonakis) Graduates: Felix Hageloh All-fragments Approaches and Statistical Machine Translation SFI/DCU [2006-2009] 'ATTEMPT: "All Trees" Efficient Models of Parsing and Translation'. In collaboration with DCU people: Andy Way, Mary Hearne, Hany Hassan, John Tinsley and Ventsislav Zhechev. Statistical Estimation from Treebanks (CLOSED) NWO-EW Open Competitie [2003-2006] Learning Stochastic Tree-Grammars from Treebanks (LeStoGram) People involved: Detlef Prescher (postdoc), Remko Scha and Khalil Sima'an (leaders). Graduates: Andreas Zollmann, Linh Thuy Nguyen and Luciano Buratto. PROJECT PERIOD FINISHED WITH FINAL REPORT Modern Hebrew and Arabic  Processing [2000-present] Joint Modeling and Estimation of Probabilistic Models for Hebrew Morphological and Syntactic Processing People involved: Khalil Sima'an (UvA), Reut Tsarfaty (UvA), and Hebrew Project (Technion) Graduates: Roy-Bar Haim (Technion, Haifa), Saib Mansour (Technion, Haifa) Collaboration: 2005 Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Summer Workshop 2005 on Parsing Arabic Dialect. Beyond Treebank Annotation: Ambiguity Resolution by Similarity-Based Performance Models Personal innovation grant (KNAW Fellowship, Royal Dutch Academy for Sciences and Humanities), 2002. Funding of Project ended in 2003 when I accepted Assistant Professorship at UvA. Data Oriented Parsing [1994-present] An ongoing joint project with various colleagues, specifically Remko Scha, Rens Bod, Andy Way, Mary Hearne and many others. ONGOING: See Remko Scha and his former student Rens Bod for more on this Keywords: Statistical Machine Translation Structured Statistical Memory-Based Models Statistical Parsing Probabilistic models and their applications Statistical Estimators Machine Learning techniques Applied Natural Language Processing Language and Speech Technology  Research interests:  Computational models of intelligent behavior, especially language processing Stochastic ambiguity resolution using probabilistic models of Natural Language Processing Machine Learning: Estimation methods  Applications e.g. Speech Understanding, Question Answering, Machine Translation Algorithms for and computational complexity of stochastic parsing Applications of machine learning algorithms to cognitive modeling Statistical and other Machine Translation Models