Hi, I'm Aaron! I help computers interact with natural human language.

I work on improving language technologies—primarily machine translation and information extraction. My research interests include endangered/low-resource language varieties, machine translation, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. I'm supported in my PhD studies by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship.

I completed my B.S. in computer science and B.S. in linguistics at the University of Kentucky (UK), where I was a Gaines Fellow and Patterson Scholar. My thesis, which focused on neural machine translation for Canadian French, was advised by Ramakanth Kavuluru. Additional research at UK included predicting student grades with deep learning (advisors: Nathan Jacobs and Craig Rudick), diachronic corpus linguistic/sociolinguistic analyses of gender (advisor: Mark Richard Lauersdorf), and endangered language preservation—primarily San Juan Quiahije Chatino (advisors: Hilaria Cruz and Raphael Finkel).

Two papers to be presented at EMNLP!

Paper presentation at MTSummit

Joined BBN Technologies as an information extraction NLP intern

Began social media research collaborations with Mark Dredze

Started my PhD at Johns Hopkins

Joined UK's Institutional Research & Advanced Analytics team

Obtained my B.S. in Linguistics and B.S. in Computer Science

Studied Québec French in Montréal and Québec City for the winter

Joined UMass Amherst's SLANG Lab for the summer

In my (these-days limited) free time, I enjoy:

• Writing, playing, and producing music (guitar, bass, banjo, synthesizer)
• Learning interesting language varieties:
  • Québec French, which has rather interesting syntactic, phonological, and historical linguistic properties compared to European French
  • Inuktitut (primarily the Iqaluit variety), a language of the Inuit in Nunavut
  • Dutch, which has a very similar syntax to German but a much more fun orthography in my opinion
• Québec culture
• Exploring big cities
• Dancing — swing, vogue, contra
• Cooking — Thai, French, German, Southern