Noah's

ARK researchers. Picture by Mattt Thompson.

Noah's ARK^[1] is Noah Smith's informal research group at the Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. (The research is formal; the group is informal.) As you may have guessed, our research focuses on problems of ambiguity and uncertainty in natural language processing, including morphology, syntax, semantics, translation, and behavioral/social phenomena observed through language.

^[1]The acronym is ambiguous; possible interpretations might include Ambiguity Research Kith or Ambiguity Resolution K. or A. R. Kibbutz. With apologies to the Bible and DAGS.

ARK Research in News and Blogs

August 2009: André, Noah, and Eric received a best paper award at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

April 2009: IBM announces a Jeopardy!-playing computer program. We saw that coming two years ago!

December 2008: Shay, Rob, and Noah received the best student paper award at the 2008 International Conference on Logic Programming.

November 2008: Shimon, Bryan, Jacob, and Noah received a research award from the Q-Group (Institute for Quantitative Research in Finanace) to study text-based portfolio choice.

May 2008: Little Green Footballs, a political blog, happened on some data Tae had on her website, prompting fascinating (to us) speculation about what we were up to. See Noah and William's response here.

January 2008: The New Scientist and Tech Digest blogs commented on Danny and Noah's relative keyboard.

November 2007: Yahoo granted us access to M45, a 4,000-processor supercomputer.

Demos

An automatic question generator by Michael Heilman
A coreference system by Brendan O'Connor and Michael Heilman

Resources and Tools

TurboParser, an open-source, trainable statistical dependency parser based on integer linear programming
DAGEEM code for unsupervised dependency grammar induction
Machine translation resources
Datasets: CURD (the Carnegie Mellon University Recipe Database); 10-K Corpus (companies' annual reports and stock return volatility data); political blog corpus

Projects

AQMAR project on Arabic NLP
RAVINE project to explore news through quotes
INCA project for multiprocessor machine translation

Researchers

(This list includes only ARK researchers without missing data!)

Name	Position	Topics	Languages (Spoken and/or Written)	Languages (Researched)	Languages (Hacked In)	Favorite Term of Venery
Shay Cohen	Ph.D. student, LTI	morphosyntactic parsing, unsupervised parsing, parsing algorithms	Hebrew, English	Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Hebrew	C++, C, Perl, Java, Matlab	shoal
Dipanjan Das	Ph.D. student, LTI	sentence-sentence semantic relationships, parsing (RAVINE)	English, Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit (swalpam)	English, Bengali	Java, C, C++, Perl	bloat
Kevin Gimpel	Ph.D. student, LTI	statistical NLP and translation (INCA)	English, German, Italian	English, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Arabic	C/C++, Perl, Java, Matlab	crash
Michael Heilman	Ph.D. student, LTI	question-answer modeling (RAVINE)	English, Japanese (sukoshi)	English, English as a second language	Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby, C++	mob
André Martins	Ph.D. student, LTI and Universidade Técnica de Lisboa	structured and kernel machine learning, parsing	Portuguese, English, Spanish, German (ein bisschen), French (un petit peu)	Portuguese, English, Spanish	C, C++, Matlab	scurry
Behrang Mohit	Post-doc, CMU-Q	Arabic NLP
Brendan O'Connor	M.S. student, LTI	text analysis and social science	English, German, Chinese (一点点)	English	R, Awk, etc.	prickle
Nate Schneider	Ph.D. student, LTI	parsing, grammar learning, semantics; cognitive linguistics (RAVINE)	English, Hebrew (קצת), Arabic (قليل), French (un peu)	English, Hebrew	Python, Java, PHP, Scheme, C#, C++	smack
Tae Yano	Ph.D. student, LTI	NLP in the political domain, rich models of structured NL data (e.g., blogs)	Japanese, English, Spanish, French	English	C, C++, Java, Perl, Python	husk
Noah Smith	Assistant Professor, LTI & MLD	(all of the above)	English, French (un peu)	Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, English, French, German, Hebrew, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Turkish	LaTeX	parade

Alumni

Dimitry Levin, B.S. '08 → Citigroup
Zach Paine, B.S. '08 (research programmer) → Google
Cari Sisson, M.S. '08 → Lyrix → Nuance
Dan Tasse, B.S. '08 → Google
Mattt Thompson, B.A. '09 → Cerego
Mengqiu Wang, M.S. '07 → Ph.D. student at Stanford

Acknowledgments

Our research has been/is supported in part by the DARPA Computer Science Study Panel program (grant numbers HR-00110110013 and NBCH-1080004), the National Science Foundation (grant numbers IIS-0713265, IIS-0836431, IIS-0844507, IIS-0915187, and a graduate fellowship to Michael Heilman), the Qatar National Research Foundation (grant number NPRP 08-485-1-083), a gift from the Berkman Faculty Development Fund at CMU, an IBM faculty award, a Q-Group award, a grant from Google, and computational resources provided by Yahoo.