Assistant Professor (Jan 2020)
Facebook CIFAR AI Chair
MILA -- Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute
McGill NLP Group, Reasoning and Learning Lab, School of Computer Science, McGill University
MCQLL, Department of Linguistics, McGill University
Researcher at ServiceNow Research

My area of research is Natural Language Processing. My research goal is to enable machines with language understanding abilities such that conversing with machines feel as natural as conversing with humans. Along this process, I hope to discover fundamental representations of language, both symbolic and distributional, that allow us to study the connection between language and meaning. My expertise includes building symbolic and deep learning models for language understanding. I work on problems such as semantic parsing, question answering, reading comprehension and conversational systems. For prospective students, here is a list of topics I work on.

Quick links: CV, Google Scholar, Twitter, Github.



Postdocs

Eva Portelance (Postdoc Jan 2023; co-advised with Tim O'Donnell)
Marius Mosbach (Postdoc Mar 2024)
Karolina Stańczak (Postdoc Mar 2024)

PhD Students

Vaibhav Adlakha (Sep 2020)
Zichao Li (Sep 2020; co-advised with Jackie Cheung)
Andreas Madsen (PhD at Polytechnique Montréal; co-advised with Sarath Chandar)
Nicholas Meade (Sep 2020)
Benno Krojer (Sep 2021)
Xing Han Lu (Sep 2021)
Parishad BehnamGhader (Jan 2022)
Gaurav Kamath (May 2022; Linguistics Eval 1 and 2)
Arkil Patel (Sep 2022; co-advised with Dzmitry Bahdanau)

Masters Students

Aristides Milios (Sep 2021; co-advised with Dzmitry Bahdanau)

Research Assistants/Interns

Amirhossein Kazemnejad (Dec 2023; Graduated with MSc from the group)

Alumni

Zdeněk Kasner (Intern Feb 2023 -> Back to Charles University)
Jasper Jian (Undergrad; 2022/23 -> PhD at Stanford Linguistics)
Sivan Milton (Undergrad; 2021/2022; -> PhD at Edinburgh NLP)
Elinor Poole-Dayan (Undergrad; Fall 2022; Winter 2021/23 -> MS at MIT Media Lab)
Nathan Schucher (MSc Sep 2020 -> Google DeepMind)
Laurestine Bradford (Jan 2022; Linguistics Eval 1; co-advised with Tim O'Donnell -> still at McGill)
Xuanda Chen (Sep 2022; Linguistics Eval 2; co-advised with Tim O'Donnell -> still at McGill)
Edoardo Ponti (Postdoc; Oct 2020 -> Faculty at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh)
Emanuele Bugliarello (Intern Jan 2022 -> Intern at Google DeepMind)
Nouha Dziri (Visting Student May 2021 -> Postdoc at AI2)
Devang Kulshreshtha (MSc Sep 2020 -> Applied Scientist, Amazon AWS)
Neshma Metri (Cognitive Science Honors Fall 2021 -> Masters in Edinburgh Informatics)
Michelle Yang (Undergrad Fall 2021 -> back to McGill; co-advised with Morgan Sonderegger)
Emily Goodwin (MA -> PhD at Stanford Linguistics; Jan 2020; co-advised with Tim O'Donnell)
Lucas Torroba Hennigen (Intern -> PhD at MIT Computer Science)
Victor Prokhorov (Intern, back to Cambridge University)

Service

Ethics chair: COLM 2024
Tutorial chair: ACL 2023
Senior area chair: NAACL 2022
Area chair: EMNLP 2022
SRW faculty advisor: ACL 2022
Area chair: NAACL 2021
Area chair: EMNLP 2020
Area chair: ACL 2020
Area chair: ACL 2019

Education

Post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University with Chris Manning.
PhD from University of Edinburgh with Mirella Lapata and Mark Steedman.

Past Industry Experience

Internship at Google NLU
Engineer at Sketch Engine

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