logo Peter Venable, PhD

Home: (412) 606-2387
Email: peter dot venable at alumni dot carnegie mellon dot edu

My thesis defense was Friday December 5th, 2004. I passed!

I have now moved on from Carnege Mellon to work with Haley Systems, so the rest of this page is probably out of date.

I havent had time to update this web page because I've been busy writing my thesis, which is titled "Modeling Syntax for Parsing and Translation" Here's an abstract:
Syntactic structure is an important component of natural language utterances, for both form and content. Therefore, a variety of applications can benefit from the integration of syntax into their statistical models of language. In this thesis, two new syntax-based models are presented, along with their training algorithms: a monolingual generative model of sentence structure, and a model of the relationship between the structure of a sentence in one language and the structure of its translation into another language. After these models are trained and tested on the respective tasks of monolingual parsing and word-level bilingual corpus alignment, they are demonstrated in two additional applications. First, a new statistical parser is automatically induced for a language in which none was available, using a bilingual corpus. Second, a statistical translation system is augmented with syntax-based models. Thus the contributions of this thesis include: a statistical parsing system; a bilingual parsing system, which infers a structural relationship between two languages using a bilingual corpus; a method for automatically building a parser for a language where no parser is available; and a translation model that incorporates phrase structure.

Some of my papers are available on the web (nothing current).

When I was at Carnegie Mellon, I worked with the Link Grammar and the RADD-MT group.

I have developed a spam filter for e-mail based on Daniel Sleator's BLOWBACK system. Try it out! (Note: it doesn't install itself, so it helps to know a little about perl, afs, maildelivery to set it up).

I also have a personal homepage.