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Past PhD Students


Veronica Qing Lyu
Graduated from University of Pennsylvania, August 2024
Thesis: Faithful and Useful Explanations by Large Language Models
Advisors: Chris Callison-Burch and Marianna Apidianaki
Current position: Researcher at Databricks

Harry Li Zhang
Graduated from University of Pennsylvania, May 2024
Thesis: Structured Event Reasoning with Large Language Models
Advisor: Chris Callison-Burch
Current position: Assistant Professor at Drexel University

Daphne Ippolito
Graduated from University of Pennsylvania, September 2022
Thesis: Understanding the Limitations of Using Large Language Models for Text Generation
Advisors: Chris Callison-Burch and Doug Eck
Current position: Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University

Reno Kriz
Graduated from University of Pennsylvania, June 2021
Thesis: Towards a Practically Useful Text Simplification System
Advisors: Chris Callison-Burch and Marianna Apidianaki
Current position: Research Scientist at Human Language Technology Center of Excellence

Anne Cocos
Graduated from University of Pennsylvania, May 2019
Thesis: Paraphrase-based Models of Lexical Semantics
Advisors: Chris Callison-Burch and Marianna Apidianaki
Current position: Senior Research Scientist at Netflix

Courtney Napoles
Graduated from Johns Hopkins University, June 2018
Thesis: Monolingual Sentence Rewriting as Machine Translation: Generation and Evaluation
Advisors: Chris Callison-Burch and Benjamin Van Durme
Current position: Engineering Director, NLP/ML/AI at Grammarly

Juri Ganitkevitch
Graduated from Johns Hopkins University, February 2018
Thesis: Large-Scale Paraphrase Extraction and Applications
Advisor: Chris Callison-Burch
Current position: Chief Scientist & Co-Founder at Espresso AI

Ellie Pavlick
Graduated from University of Pennsylvania, July 2017
Thesis: Compositional Lexical Semantics in Natural Language Inference
Advisor: Chris Callison-Burch
Current position: Assistant Professor at Brown University

Ann Irvine
Graduated from Johns Hopkins University, July 2014
Thesis: Using Comparable Corpora to Augment Low Resource Statistical Machine Translation Models
Advisor: Chris Callison-Burch
Current position: Chief Data Scientist & VP of Product Management at Resilience

Xuchen Yao
Graduated from Johns Hopkins University, July 2014
Thesis: Feature-Driven Question Answering with Natural Language Alignment
Advisors: Benjamin Van Durme and Chris Callison-Burch
Current position: Cofounder/CEO at Seasalt.ai and Vobil.com

Omar Zaidan
Graduated from Johns Hopkins University, April 2012
Thesis: Crowdsourcing Annotation for Machine Learning in Natural Language Processing Tasks
Advisor: Chris Callison-Burch
Current position: Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon

Past Postdocs


Lara Martin
Current position: Assistant Professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli
Current position: Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft

Derry Wijaya
Current position: Assistant Professor at Boston University

Anietie Andy
Current position: Assistant Professor at Howard University

Wei Xu
Current position: Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech

Matt Post
Current position: Researcher at Microsoft Translator

Alex Klementiev
Current position: Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon