Noah's

ARK researchers in October 2012.

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—all viewed through a computational lens.

^[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: Awards, News Coverage

Demos

• A coreference system by Brendan O'Connor and Michael Heilman.
• A parse tree visualizer by Brendan O'Connor.

Resources and Tools

ARK researchers in April 2009. Picture by Mattt Thompson.

• NLP tools:
  • universal part-of-speech tagset, set of twelve coarse POS tags that generalizes across several languages
  • Semantics: SEMAFOR, an open-source statistical frame-semantic parser
  • Syntax: TurboParser, an open-source, trainable statistical dependency parser; MSTParserStacked, an open-source, trainable statistical dependency parser based on stacking; DAGEEM code for unsupervised dependency grammar induction
  • Information extraction: Arabic named entity recognizer
  • Libraries/languages: AD³, an approximate MAP decoder; *Dyna, a declarative programming language for dynamic programming algorithms
• Machine translation tools, including: *cdec, a framework for statistical translation and other structure prediction problems; *Egypt, a statistical machine translation toolkit that includes Giza; gappy pattern models, code for modeling monolingual and bilingual textual patterns with gaps; Rampion, a training algorithm for statistical machine translation models
• Social media tools, including: Twitter NLP resources
• Datasets: *STRAND (parallel text collections from the web); CURD (the Carnegie Mellon University Recipe Database); 10-K Corpus (company annual reports and stock return volatility data); political blog corpus; movie$ corpus; question-answer data; Congressional bills corpus; Arabic named entity and supersense corpora

Researchers

Outdated Photo	Name	Position	Topics	Languages (Spoken and/or Written)	Languages (Researched)	Languages (Hacked In)	Favorite Term of Venery
	Waleed Ammar	Ph.D. student, LTI	statistical machine translation, text analytics	Arabic, English	English, Arabic, Hebrew, Kinyarwanda	C#, C/C++, Javascript, ruby, Java, PHP, ASP.net	charm
	David Bamman	Ph.D. student, LTI	sociolinguistic variation; statistical NLP for computational social science and the humanities	English, Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian (un po), French (un peu), German (ein bisschen), Mandarin Chinese (一点儿)	English, Latin, Ancient Greek, Chinese	Java, Python, Perl	coalition
	Victor Chahuneau	M.S. student, LTI
	Chris Dyer	Assistant Professor, LTI & MLD	machine translation, unsupervised learning, text-based forecasting, big data	English, German	Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Telugu, Turkish, Urdu, Welsh	C++, Perl, Java	conspiracy
	Behrang Mohit	Post-doc, CMU-Q	Arabic NLP, machine translation, semantics	English, Persian (Farsi), Arabic	English, Arabic	Java, Python
	Brendan O'Connor	Ph.D. student, MLD	text analysis and social science	English, German	English, Chinese	R, Awk, etc.	prickle
	Bryan Routledge	Associate Professor of finance, Tepper	Finance, asset pricing	English, Canadian	N/A	Matlab, R, Stata, Perl, Excel, Cobol	pod
	Nathan Schneider	Ph.D. student, LTI	semantics and its relation to linguistic structure; cognitive linguistics	English, Hebrew (קצת), Arabic (قليل), French (un peu), German (ein bisschen)	English, Hebrew, Arabic	Python, Java, PHP, Scheme, Javascript	smack
	Yanchuan Sim	Ph.D. student, LTI	Bayesian graphical modeling, text mining	English, Chinese (Mandarin, Teochew, Cantonese, Hokkien)	English	C/C++, Java, Python	exaltation
	Sam Thomson	M.S. student, LTI	semantic parsing	English, Spanish	English	Python, Java, JavaScript, R	murder
	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
	Dani Yogatama	Ph.D. student, LTI	text-driven forecasting	Indonesian, Japanese, English	English, Japanese, French, Spanish	C/C++, Java, Python, Matlab	band
	Noah Smith	Associate Professor, LTI & MLD	(most of the above)	English, French (un peu)	Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, English, French, German, Hebrew, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Turkish	LaTeX	parade

Alumni

• Victor Chahuneau, M.S. '13 → Stanford Ph.D. program
• Kevin Gimpel, Ph.D. '12 [proof] → Assistant Research Professor, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
• Chris Dyer, Post-doc, 2010–12 → Assistant Professor, CMU
• André Martins, Ph.D., '12 [proof] → Research Scientist, Priberam SA
• Dipanjan Das, Ph.D., '12 [proof] → Research Scientist, Google Research
• Shay Cohen, Ph.D. '11 [proof] → Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University → Lecturer, University of Edinburgh
• Michael Heilman, Ph.D. '11 [proof] → Associate Research Scientist, Educational Testing Service
• Cari (Sisson) Bader, M.S. '08 [proof] → Lyrix → Nuance

• Rishav Bhowmick, B.S. '10 (CMU-Q)
• Desai Chen, B.S. '11 → MIT CSAIL Ph.D. program
• Philip Gianfortoni, B.S. '09 (research programmer) → LTI M.S. program
• Mohammad Haque, B.S. '10 → Endeca
• Dimitry Levin, B.S. '08 → Citigroup
• Zack McCord
• Zach Paine, B.S. '08 (research programmer) → Google
• Naomi Saphra, B.S. '13 → Johns Hopkins Ph.D. program
• Neel Shah, B.S. '10
• Dan Tasse, B.S. '08 → Google
• Mattt Thompson, B.A. '09 → Cerego
• Mengqiu Wang, M.S. '07 → Stanford Ph.D. program

Acknowledgments