Thu Nov 13 21:34:15 PST 2008

i'm amittai axelrod.
i'm not a huge fan of personal photographs nor fancy formatting, as you might have noticed...
this is my temporary homepage until i update it again (in my copious free time, natürlich), which probably won't happen until someone links to here, which probably won't happen unless i update this page...

i work on machine translation (MT), which is the study of how to input information in one human language (Maltese, Urdu, whatever) into a computer system and have the computer output the same general information in some other human language, such as Flemish.
i'd like to work on MT systems that don't have the somewhat onerous resource prerequisites, such as a deep parser, that syntax-based MT systems do. relatedly, i'm also really interested in MT problems that arise when either translating out of English or between non-English languages.

i'm currently a second-year phd student in the Signal, Speech and Language Interpretation Lab at the University of Washington.
my advisor is Professor Katrin Kirchhoff.
there are a few other people interested in Machine Translation here, namely Kevin Duh, Mei Yang, and Jeremy Kahn.

i currently run the Machine Translation Reading Group.

i used to be in the Statistical Machine Translation Group led by Philipp Koehn, in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

my ~~liege~~ advisor at Edinburgh (magnificent city; smells like toast) was the inestimable Professor Miles Osborne.

eof