Emily M. Bender

Emily Bender

Emily Bender joined the UW faculty in 2003 and is now director and assistant professor of the Professional Master's in Computational Linguistics Program at the University of Washington.

Bender's primary interests are in computational linguistics (especially grammar engineering and natural language processing), syntax and the study of variation. Her language interests include (Standard) English, African American Vernacular English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, American Sign Language, and Malayalam. She received her PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University and has also studied at the Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. She is currently working on the LinGO Grammar Matrix, an open-source toolkit designed to jump-start the development of broad-coverage precision implemented grammars of diverse languages.

She has received the Stanford Alumni Association Dissertation Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and the University Medal.

Visit Emily Bender's Web site.

William Lewis

William Lewis

Before joining the Professional Master's in Computational Linguistics' faculty at the University of Washington, William Lewis was a member of the linguistics department faculty at California State University, Fresno, where he worked on defining an ontology of linguistics. His other research has focused on how a language chooses its basic vocabulary and on the creation of a function that describes this process. Lewis' interests also include Corpus Linguistics, especially Web as Corpus, computational linguistics, adult language processing, morphosyntax and typology.

In January 2004, Lewis was awarded the Data-Driven Linguistic Ontology Development Grant through NSF (NSF #0411348), and a subsequent supplement to the grant was awarded in November 2004. He also received a research award for his work on linguistically oriented text mining in September 2003, and a Cognitive Science Program Development Grant in November 2003, both through CSU Fresno. Lewis received his Ph D. in Linguistics from the University of Arizona in August 2002.

Fei Xia

Fei Xia

As one of the newest members to the Professional Master's in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington, Xia brings an extensive knowledge on natural language processing systems to the program.

Before joining the UW, Xia was a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Her primary fields of interest are machine translation and grammar generation. Her current research focuses on developing natural language processing systems that combine the strengths of the rule-based and statistical approaches. She is also interested in other areas of natural language processing, including question answering and information extraction.

Fei received her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania where she was awarded the IRCS and Dean's Fellowships.