Advising
Prospective students FAQ
Are you taking on M.S. or PhD students in Computational Linguistics?
Yes! I regularly take PhD and M.S. students, who typically join my lab, Corpling@GU. The PhD comes with full but very competitive fellowship funding. Read more about the programs here. The admissions deadline for the following Fall are:
- M.S. in Computational Linguistics - January 15th
- PhD in Computational Linguistics - December 1st
What kinds of research do you do?
My lab's work focuses on building and evaluating datasets to test how humans and computational models such as LLMs perform natural language tasks, especially in the area of discourse processing. This includes topics like:
- Salience - how do we signal that some part of what we say is more important? Which parts of a text do we recognize as more salient? What information do we drop when we summarize a text and why? What kind of computational models can we build to represent dynamic salience in language? (example paper)
- Entity tracking and anaphora - how are participants introduced into discourse? How do we recognize that two phrases refer to the same thing in the world? How do models like LLMs understand and produce referring expressions such as names, descriptions and pronouns? (example paper)
- Discourse relations - how do we recognize implicit relations that apply between utterances, such as cause and effect or temporal ordering? How do we structure complex texts into sections, subsections or parts? What are the signals we use to convey or disambiguate the intended meaning of our utterances? (example paper)
In addition to these topics I also have a line of work on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for low resource languages in the Digital Humanities - in the past few years this has been focused on the Coptic language in this project. Here's a paper we wrote about reconstructing damaged Coptic manuscripts!
What kinds of students are you looking for?
M.S. students should ideally have a degree in either Linguistics, Computer Science or a related area, and should be curious to learn about the 'other' side of either language or computation - it's fine if you're not a great coder or don't have formal training in syntax or semantics - that's what you'd come to Georgetown to learn! But good candidates typically have at least some computational or linguistic background - otherwise it's just not possible to complete the program in time.
For the PhD, strong candidates will have a well founded background in either computation or language, and at least some experience with the other field. If you have some previous quantitative work using language data, you should include it as a writing sample, and you should clearly articulate what your research interests are. No one knows exactly what they'll do in their PhD, even a year after they start, but stating your interests clearly helps us to figure out whether you might be a good fit either for my lab or one of the other advisors in the department.
In terms of interests, I look for students who love language and languages, want to understand how they work, and are interested in real natural language data in context. I'm interested in questions like "what do we know when we know a language?" and "what do you know after you read a text?" It's easy to come up with examples of things we can learn, but it's much harder to build an interpretable computational representation of that knowledge. I'm looking for students who are fascinated by these questions and want to help answer them.
Can I take both Linguistics and Computer Science courses in the CL program?
Absolutely, and not just those but with approval you could take courses at almost any department, including Math/Stats, languages and more. There is also a Cognitive Science concentration you can take concurrently.
Do you have advice on how to write a statement of purpose?
Maybe, but my colleague Nathan Schneider beat me to it with this excellent post that I don't have much to add to - please check it out!
Where can I find out more about the program?
The best source of information for CL courses, research and people at Georgetown is the GUCL page. If you're considering applying, you can also try to contact some of the students listed on the page to get some student views on the program you're thinking about.