Guilde For Language Processors

Many thanks are due here. First, to Chris Manning for being a fantastic, insightful advisor. He shaped how I think, write, and do research at a very deep level. I learned from him how to be a linguist and a computer scientist at the same time (he’s constantly in both worlds) and how to see where an approach will break before I even try it. His taste in research was also a terrific match to mine; we found so many of the same problems and solutions com- pelling (even though our taste in restaurants can probably never be reconciled). Something I hope to emulate in the future is how he always made me feel like I had the freedom to work on whatever I wanted, but also managed to ensure that my projects were always going somewhere useful. Second, thanks to Daphne Koller, who gave me lots of good advice and support over the years, often in extremely dense bursts that I had to meditate on to fully appreciate. I’m also constantly amazed at how much I learned in her cs228 course. It was actually the only course I took at Stanford, but after taking that one, what else do you need? Rounding out my reading committee, Dan Jurafsky got me in the habit of asking myself, “What is the rhetorical point of this slide?” which I intend to ask myself mercilessly every time I prepare a presentation. The whole committee deserves extra collective thanks for bearing with my strange thesis timeline, which was most definitely not optimally conve- nient for them. Thanks also to the rest of my defense committee, Herb Clark and David Beaver.