Benjamin Snyder


Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1210 W. Dayton St. Room 6395, (608) 890-0124


Current Research

My research focuses on the development of multilingual NLP techniques and systems. While language technology research has traditionally focused on English and a few other common world languages, the global penetration of the internet requires a new, multilingual, approach. By taking such an approach, we open the door to several exciting avenues of research:


Awards


Media


PhD Students


Biography

Benjamin Snyder is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Computer Sciences. His research areas include natural language processing, computational linguistics, and cognitive science. Ben received his Ph.D. in EECS from MIT in 2010. He received his B.A in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. During the fall of 2010, Ben worked as a post-doc in the CIS department at Penn as a member of Ben Taskar's research group.


Teaching


Publications

Training a Korean SRL System with Rich Morphological Features
Young-Bum Kim, Heemoon Chae, Benjamin Snyder and Yu-Seop Kim. ACL 2014 (short paper)

Unsupervised Consonant-Vowel Prediction over Hundreds of Languages
Young-Bum Kim and Benjamin Snyder. ACL 2013

Modeling Child Divergences from Adult Grammar
Sam Sahakian and Benjamin Snyder. Transactions of the ACL 2013

Optimal Data Set Selection: An Application to Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion
Young-Bum Kim and Benjamin Snyder. NAACL 2013

Universal Grapheme to Phoneme Prediction over Latin Alphabets
Young-Bum Kim and Benjamin Snyder. EMNLP 2012
Data

Automatically Learning Measures of Child Language Development
Sam Sahakian and Benjamin Snyder. ACL 2012 (short paper)

Universal Morphological Analysis using Structured Nearest Neighbor Prediction
Young-Bum Kim, Joao Graca, and Benjamin Snyder. EMNLP 2011

Unsupervised Multilingual Learning. PhD Thesis.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT. September 2010.
⇒ Winner of the ACM dissertation award honorable mention.
⇒ Winner of the George M. Sprowls Award for best doctoral thesis.


A Statistical Model for Lost Language Decipherment
Benjamin Snyder, Regina Barzilay, and Kevin Knight. ACL 2010
Write-up in National Geographic News
Write-up in MIT news
Interview on Swedish National Radio

Climbing the Tower of Babel: Unsupervised Multilingual Learning
Benjamin Snyder and Regina Barzilay. ICML 2010

Multilingual Part-of-Speech Tagging: Two Unsupervised Approaches
Tahira Naseem, Benjamin Snyder, Jacob Eisenstein, and Regina Barzilay. JAIR 36 (2009)

Unsupervised Multilingual Grammar Induction
Benjamin Snyder, Tahira Naseem, and Regina Barzilay. ACL 2009
⇒ Slides: (PDF) (Keynote)

Adding More Languages Improves Unsupervised Multilingual Part-of-Speech Tagging:
A Bayesian Non-Parametric Approach

Benjamin Snyder, Tahira Naseem, Jacob Eisenstein, and Regina Barzilay. NAACL 2009
⇒ Slides: (PDF) (Keynote)

Unsupervised Multilingual Learning for POS Tagging
Benjamin Snyder, Tahira Naseem, Jacob Eisenstein, and Regina Barzilay. EMNLP 2008
Code & Data   Slides: (PDF) (Keynote)

Unsupervised Multilingual Learning for Morphological Segmentation
Benjamin Snyder and Regina Barzilay. ACL 2008
⇒ Slides: (PDF) (Keynote)

Cross-lingual Propagation for Morphological Analysis
Benjamin Snyder and Regina Barzilay. AAAI 2008

Multiple Aspect Ranking for Opinion Analysis
Benjamin Snyder. Master's Thesis, MIT 2007

Incremental Text Structuring with Online Hierarchical Ranking
Erdong Chen, Benjamin Snyder, and Regina Barzilay. EMNLP 2007

Multiple Aspect Ranking using the Good Grief Algorithm
Benjamin Snyder and Regina Barzilay. NAACL 2007
⇒ (Data and Code) (Slides)
See my Master's Thesis for improved results, generalizations, and theoretical analysis.
Restaurant Browser system

Database-Text Alignment via Structured Multilabel Classification
Benjamin Snyder and Regina Barzilay. IJCAI 2007
⇒ (Data)