Resume

Education

University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D. in Linguistics (May 2001).
Dissertation title: Conspiracy in Historical Phonology.
Dissertation advisor: Donald A. Ringe, Jr.

University of Delaware
M. A. in Linguistics (May 1994)

West Virginia University
M. A. in Language Teaching Methods (August 1991). Focus on electronic technology in language teaching.
B. A. in Linguistics and German (December 1989). Graduated summa cum laude; Phi Beta Kappa; received several other distinctions.

Experience

Amazon
Pittsburgh, PA
Machine Translation Localization Engineer
December 2016-current

Build custom and generic machine translation systems for major commercial language arcs (English-Japanese, English-German, etc.)

Humedica (United Health Group)
Boston, MA
Natural Language Processing Software Engineer
February 2015-November 2016

Extract semantics from patient medical notes written by physicians.

Nuance Communications, Inc.
Burlington, MA
Senior Speech Scientist
March 2007-February 2015

Develop and maintain telephone-based, public-facing voice recognition systems for Fortune 500 companies. Analyze recognizer performance in deployed systems based on call log files and captured audio, empirically optimizing recognition parameters and grammars to improve overall automated call completion rate. Build recognition grammars for new systems. Create and implement custom recognition strategies for special contexts. Critically evaluate specifications for proposed applications, and make data-driven recommendations for improvements on deployed applications. Created a novel graph partitioning method, now under patent (#9,338,284)

Europäische Akademie
Bozen, Italy
Senior Researcher
June 2006-Feb 2007

Responsible for design, creation, and maintenance of “Korpus Südtirol,” a large electronic corpus of German text written in the South Tyrol (Alto Adige) region of northern Italy. Designed XML schemata for long-term maintainability of the data.

Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA
Visiting Assistant Professor
Sept 2001-Aug 2006

Designed and taught courses in multiple areas of linguistics, including computational linguistics/natural language processing.

Managed Phonetics Laboratory. Trained students in the fundamentals of acoustic phonetic analysis. Selected, purchased, and maintained audio processing equipment for a research-grade laboratory. System administrator for Red Hat Linux machine. Trained students in many technologies. Managed professional-grade archiving of audio, video, and online text linguistic data.

Initiated and oversaw the Germanic Lexicon Project, a large-scale collection of professional-grade lexical data on the early Germanic languages. Wrote a search engine in Perl with a MySQL back-end.

University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA
Programmer
1995-1999 (intermittent)

Developed Trees 1.0 for Macintosh and Trees 2.0 for Macintosh in Pascal using the classic Macintosh API (approximately 20,000 lines of code). Designed and implemented a custom interpreted scripting language for the project. Trees is a teaching tool for undergraduate linguistic courses; it allows the student to assemble syntactic trees and provides feedback to the student.

Developed Trees 3.0 for Windows in C++ using the Windows MFC API. Implemented a scripting language interpreter using yacc and lex.

Linguistic Data Consortium
Philadelphia, PA
Research Assistant
1994-1996

Participated as a principal author in developing the LDC Japanese Lexicon, a specialized electronic lexicon of Japanese for use in speech recognition technology. Extensive script development in Perl.

Participated in the development of the LDC German Lexicon.

Additional experience

Taught numerous linguistics and ESL courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the University of Delaware, and West Virginia University in 1989-2005, as well as classes in ESL and German at the California Gaigo Gakuin, Kumamoto, Japan in 1991-1992.

Technical skills

Primary skills: Unix/Linux command line, Perl, XML, HTML, SQL/MySQL, Nuance NR9 voice recognizer.

Selected additional skills: Python, Java, C/C++, JavaScript, machine learning, LAMP web development, CSS, Catalyst (Perl-based MVC web framework), Tk, ImageMagick, yacc, lex, TeX.

Patents

Patent 9,338,294: Automated Task Definitions. A novel graph-partitioning method.

Languages

Following are the languages I speak:

English: Native language

German: Fluent; not quite at native competence, but at a high functional level in all language skills

Japanese: Medium level of competence

I studied the following languages formally for one to two semesters each:

Modern languages:

French (can read French with a dictionary)

Somali

Arabic

Russian

Dutch

American Sign Language

Pre-modern languages:

Latin

Classical Greek

Old English

Old Icelandic

Middle High German

Gothic

Tocharian A

Tocharian B